ZachXBT is sued, community donates over $600,000 in hours

One of the most popular on-chain crypto sleuths, going by the ZachXBT Twitter account, said he was being sued for an article he published last year.

The researcher said he was not wealthy, unlike the person suing him, and needed community support for his defense. This support has been quite impressive so far.

• ZachXBT took to Twitter last night to inform that he was being sued by ‘MachiBigBrother’ for a article published a year ago. The story itself names Jeff Huang (Machi), whom ZachXBT described as a “Taiwanese-American former musician and tech entrepreneur who embezzled 22,000 ETH from Formosa Financial in 2018.”
• He goes into depth about how Huang managed to defraud investors by launching “more than ten failed pump and dump tokens and NFT projects.”
• Huang has now filed a defamation lawsuit against ZachXBT, which the latter described as “baseless and an attempt to chill free speech.”
• The researcher further defined the lawsuit as a “classic David and Goliath story” due to the alleged difference in wealth between the two parties.
• He thinks his defense could exceed $1 million, which is why he created a crypto donation address to “help with legal costs.”

3/ I am creating a donation address to help with the legal costs associated with defending this case, which could easily exceed US$1 million.

Any remaining funds will be returned pro rata to contributors.

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) June 16, 2023

• The on-chain data suggests that the wallet itself has received nearly $600,000 worth of crypto in 14 hours after the tweet was posted (at the time of this writing). He has $300,000 in ETH, $180,000 in USDC, $67,000 in USDT, and more.
• Additionally, other members of the crypto community have urged ZachXBT to create BTC wallets for those who do not use EVM chains.