- CZ and Binance were called out for blatantly copying the ideas of a product created by winners of the BNB Chain hackathon.
- One of the obvious similarities includes the names of the project being “Bicasso” and “Chatcasso.”
- A spokesperson at Binance denies plagiarising the projects of the BNB Chain winners.
Popular cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, was accused by the BNB Chain Hackathon’s winner of stealing ideas and also launched an AI-powered NFT (Non-Fungible Token) generation tool called Bicasso.
Shortly after two months of announcing the competitors as the winner of the BNB Chain hackathon, which took place in Seoul, Binance allegedly implemented this genius idea by developing its own AI-based NFT creation tool.
Upon Binance’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, announcing the launch of Bicasso on his Twitter page, ggoma quoted the tweet by accusing the crypto exchange of “blatantly copying” the idea which gave the ‘Steem Hunt’ team the first place prize of $5,000 in BUSD at last year’s hackathon.
According to ggoma’s narration on Twitter, the product of his team’s win was called ‘Chatcasso’ and could be used to create any creative idea into NFTs with the help of AI.
“We were ecstatic. We thought our hard work had paid off, and we had a great product foundation we could build on, but it seems like Binance had other plans,” ggoma said.
The winner of 2022’s Seoul BNB Chain hackathon further shared images, comparing the team’s product, Chatcasso, and Binance’s new product, Bicasso.
“It’s disheartening to see a company that claims to support innovation and development steal from the very people who are working hard to build the ecosystem,”
However, a spokesman for Binance has refuted the Web3 developers’ charges of plagiarism, alleging that Bicasso was an experimental project produced by a small team at Binance as a prototype. The spokesperson further stated that NFTs and Als are not unusual concepts in the Web3 space, as many developers in the industry have worked on the idea.
Although there are similarities between Chatcasso and Bicasso, the spokesperson at Binance claimed that both projects having these similarities does not mean one of them was plagiarised.
BNB Chain and Binance operate independently. Hence, Binance had yet to be privy to BNB Chain’s hackathon. Ggoma called Binance’s action “unethical” and confusing to its users due to the name similarities of the two projects. However, Binance indicated that the name of its project, Bicasso, was inspired by an OpenAI tool known as “Dall-E,” as a reference to the artist Salvador Dali.
Conclusion
The famous crypto exchange, Binance, did not expect to be at the center of a plagiarism scandal when it announced its new NFT Al-based project news. Although the crypto firm denies copying the products of a BNB Chain hackathon winner, the similarities between the two projects have raised questions in the minds of some people in the crypto community.
