ZachXBT Receives Over $1M in Crypto Donations to Fight Defamation Lawsuit

The wider crypto community has donated more than $1 million in various tokens to popular blockchain sleuth ZachXBT to pay for his legal fees in a defamation lawsuit, data from analytics tool Nansen show.

On-chain data shows that ZachXBT — who is known for his investigative work in the blockchain and crypto sectors — gathered over $1 million in donations from the crypto community a little over a day after he set up his donation wallet address. The popular blockchain investigator became the target of a defamation lawsuit last Friday, when Jeffrey Huang — also known as MachiBigBrother on Twitter — accused him of damaging his reputation through false allegations.

The lawsuit was filed exactly one year after ZachXBT had published an article titled “22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)”. In his article, the blockchain investigator alleges that Huang had embezzled millions of dollars worth of crypto from the community by launching “over 10 failed pump and dump tokens and NFT projects” over the years.

In a Twitter thread ZachXBT said this lawsuit was a “classic David & Goliath story”, noting that the allegedly rich Huang was using his money to try and silence the blockchain investigator. After calling the lawsuit “baseless”, ZachXBT set up a donation wallet address for his followers to assist him with the legal fees, which he said “could easily exceed $1m USD”.

The crypto community quickly showed how highly they valued the work of the blockchain sleuth, and in a little over 24 hours more than $1 million in crypto was donated to the wallet address. The big name backers included Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell, Tron creator Justin Sun, blockchain security firm CertiK, and more.