DigiByte Delisted from Poloniex After Project Founder Criticizes Exchange

United States-based digital assets exchange, Poloniex, which allegedly has close ties to the TRON project, has delisted the DigiByte token. This decision was made following several tweets by DigiByte founder Jared Tate criticizing the exchange, TRON founder and CEO Justin Sun, and Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao. On Dec 3, Tate called Sun and Zhao ‘crooks’ who were operating on borrowed time,

Tired of the bullshit in this industry. I haven’t dedicated the last 8 years of my life to sit idly by and watch #blockchain tech be hijacked by a bunch of crooks like @justinsuntron and @cz_binance. Time has come.

— Jared Tate ©️ (@jaredctate) December 3, 2019

Tate formed his opinion while writing his book, Blockchain 2035, for which he has been researching altcoins. The founder took to Twitter to state these thoughts and posted a nine-part long tweet that detailed his thoughts on the Ethereum rival founder. Among other remarks, Tate complained that the TRON network is completely centralized and that it was the ‘most blatant con job.’ Tate had also spoken with former TRON CTO Lucien Chen, who allegedly agreed with Tate on the issues of centralization in the project.

DigiByte Gets the Axe

In the final tweet, Tate remarked that he was upset that sensitive user data was in the hands of Poloniex, which he called a ‘TRX shill factory.’ The Poloniex exchange’s official Twitter handle responded to this shortly after, saying that ‘DigiByte is not qualified for our listing standard.’ As for Binance, Tate has made some strong claims, saying that Binance demanded $300,000 and 3% of all of DigiByte’s token supply in order to be listed. Zhao responded to this accusation, https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1175258923382652929

Cryptocurrency Community Reacts to the Delisting

The cryptocurrency community, while generally critical of the inflammatory remarks, has suggested that the delisting could be directly linked to the critical tweets posted by Tate. The delisting occurred only hours after Tate made the tweet. Others, such as popular analyst and trader, CryptoCred, have called out the decision saying that a ‘careful review’ is not possible in a matter of hours.

Crypto is fucking surreal.

DigiByte founder posts a thread criticising TRON and its usurpation of Poloniex.

Hours later, Poloniex replies saying that DigiByte is going to be delisted from their platform after a miraculous and entirely coincidental "careful review".

Stunning. https://t.co/oGsvgPjYOT

— Cred (@CryptoCred) December 5, 2019

Rob Paone, the founder of the blockchain recruitment firm ProofOfTalent, also pointed to the fact that the delisting came suspiciously quick after Tate’s comments.

DigiByte founder yells at Poloniex on Twitter.

Polo says nahhhh and drops the hammer with a delist in 4 hours lmaoooo pic.twitter.com/pCoazyGmcS

— Rob "Crypto Bobby" Paone (@crypto_bobby) December 5, 2019

Poloniex and TRON Have a History

The allegations that Poloniex and TRON have connections stem from the fact that the two entities have some history. In late November, Poloniex acquired TRON’s decentralized exchange, TRXMarket. It has also been reported that Poloniex posted a now-deleted tweet saying, ‘Let’s buy TRON,’ which raised suspicions that it was backing the project Most notable of all, however, is the fact that Sun has confirmed that he was part of the investor group involved in acquiring Poloniex from Circle.