ZachXBT & NFT Trader Machi Settle Their Dispute - ZachXBT Refunds Donated Funds

ZachXBT & NFT Trader Machi Settle Their Dispute – ZachXBT Refunds Donated Funds

Updated: 15 August 2023

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

ZachXBT, an independent blockchain detective, has started refunding some of the donated funds after crypto investor and non-fungible token collector Machi Big Brother voluntarily withdrew his defamation lawsuit against the crypto sleuth. ZachXBT initially received a donation from a well-wisher to fund his lawsuit.

Refunds for legal funds donations should be ready to go next week I expect.

>ETH mainnet will have a claim contract courtesy of @0xngmi @0xCygaar
>SOL & Pulse was just refunded now
>EVM chains will be manually dispersed this week
>Some will be manually refunded

More details…

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) August 14, 2023

Machi Withdraws His Lawsuit Against ZachXBT

Jeffrey Huang, popularly known on the social media platform Twitter as Machi Big Brother and ZachXBT, started their legal fight mid-last year after the crypto sleuth published a report relating Huang with scams and other fraudulent activities.

Last year, ZachXBT published a report on his Medium blog and Twitter alleging that Machi Big Brother manipulated crypto markets and embezzled 22,000 Ether, worth over $38 million at the time of writing. At the time, Mach Big Brother strongly refuted such claims.

On June 15, 2023, Mach Big Brother filed a defamation lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleging ZachXBT of defaming him by “inflicting serious reputational and monetary harm.” In the complaint sheet, Mach Big Brother layer wrote:

“Without any regard for the ruinous effect that public allegations of criminal conduct can produce for the accused individual, [ZachXBT] not only proceeded to publish his defamatory article on Medium.com, he also maliciously promoted the article to his more than 300,000 Twitter followers”

ZachXBT rapidly responded to the lawsuit, describing it as a classic David and Goliath story. The crypto detective knew in his mind that Machi Big Brother was very wealthy and feared he might be using his money to try to silence him. In his complaint, Machi Big Brother demanded compensatory and exemplary damages of an amount to be determined by the court.

ZachXBT Refunds Donated Funds

Since ZachXBT did not have the financial muscles to fight in the corridors of justice, he called for help from his crypto community. In just a few weeks, the crypto sleuth raised more than $1 million in crypto, which was more than enough to cater for the lawsuit expenditures.

ZachXBT has gained massive popularity within the crypto and NFT community after publishing original blockchain data analyses allegedly exposing the misdeeds of bad actors populating crypto and NFT spaces. His meaningful investigations have helped him amass a following of more than 400,000 users on Twitter.

In the meantime, ZachXBT has started disbursing the remainder of donated funds after Mach Big Brother voluntarily withdrew his initial defamation lawsuit earlier this week. Donations received through Fantom, Arbitrum Nova, Polygon zkEVM, Harmony, Moonbeam, and Gnosis are all manually refunded now, while more are set to start next week. The claim period will close in 12 months.

1/2 Today @machibigbrother has agreed to voluntarily withdraw the lawsuit. I have updated my article with additional context from Machi + edits from myself

While I am disappointed it went down the legal route in the first place I am appreciative we are able to find a resolution

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) August 14, 2023