Justin Sun responded bluntly after an investigation into viral claims that small unwanted deposits were freezing crypto accounts revealed the story was completely made up.
Earlier today, the report spread fast enough to look like a genuine sanctions-era crisis unfolding in real time, but a direct check of the blockchain showed the findings didn't match the claims at all.
The pushback came from a user going by 0xMoon, who described getting pulled into this story almost by accident. They said a friend forwarded them the original post because they held some assets on HTX, and after handling something else first, they came home and dug into the claims directly rather than taking them at face value.
I think what makes this response genuinely credible is the method, not just the conclusion. Rather than simply denying the story, 0xMoon reached out to HTX first to ask whether the exchange could trace which account performed the alleged transfer to Ziye, one of the original users who claimed their Coinbase account had been "poisoned" with 7.5 USDT from HTX. According to 0xMoon, HTX's response was that Ziye had refused to provide his deposit address, citing privacy concerns. That refusal is exactly where 0xMoon picked up the trail themselves, going directly to the on-chain data instead of waiting.
Here's where the story really starts to unravel. 0xMoon checked HTX's hot wallet #48 and confirmed that roughly twelve hours earlier, there had genuinely been 166 small outflows of USDT sent out from it, so the underlying pattern of small transfers wasn't fabricated on its face. But following that trail specifically for transactions of 7.5 USDT, the exact amount Ziye claimed to have received, turned up 15 addresses that had gotten that amount. Every single one of them was a Kraken deposit address. Not one was a Coinbase deposit address.
0xMoon went further, checking every transaction under 7.5 USDT sent from that wallet and finding that no single address had received two separate transactions, ruling out the idea that Ziye's supposed deposit was simply missed in an earlier pass. Many of the 15 addresses that did receive the 7.5 USDT amount also showed normal deposit and withdrawal activity afterward, meaning they clearly hadn't been flagged or risk-controlled the way the original story described happening to affected users. In plain terms: the specific transaction Ziye described, landing in a Coinbase account and triggering a freeze, simply doesn't appear anywhere in the actual on-chain record of what HTX's wallet sent out.
The original story didn't rest on Ziye's account alone, it was framed as something multiple industry insiders were reporting simultaneously. 0xMoon checked that claim too, and said they searched X's records and couldn't find a second person actually reporting the same experience. They added that they personally hadn't heard of anyone else having HTX funds frozen recently either, and pointed to their own experience as a counterpoint, having made a deposit and withdrawal on HTX just two days earlier that went through smoothly with no issues at all.
I think that detail matters more than it might seem at first. A story built on "multiple industry insiders" reporting the same pattern carries very different weight than a single, unverified account that others simply amplified without independently checking. Once you strip away the assumption of multiple corroborating witnesses, what's left is one claim that doesn't match the wallet's own transaction history, and no second source that 0xMoon could actually locate.
Justin Sun didn't add much beyond a simple confirmation of 0xMoon's findings, but the brevity itself said a lot given how seriously the original claims had been treated. He wrote plainly that the investigation had revealed the truth: it was all made up.
I think it's worth being fair to 0xMoon's own framing here too, since they were notably more careful in their language than Sun's blunt summary suggests. 0xMoon explicitly said they didn't want to speculate subjectively about why Ziye's account doesn't match the on-chain record, and specifically noted that providing the actual deposit address would make resolving the discrepancy far easier. That's a meaningfully more measured position than declaring the whole thing fabricated outright, and I think that nuance deserves to stay attached to this story rather than getting flattened into a simple "proven false" headline.
I think the honest way to read where this leaves things is genuinely uncomfortable for anyone who shared the original claims without checking them first, myself included in covering it as seriously as I did. A story that spread specifically because it fit neatly into an already-tense sanctions narrative around HTX turned out, on the one piece of it someone actually verified against the blockchain, to not hold up. The wallet activity was real. The specific claim about where that activity ended up wasn't backed by anything 0xMoon could find.
That doesn't necessarily mean nothing unusual happened to anyone, and 0xMoon's own restraint on that point is worth respecting rather than overriding with a flat "it was all fake" conclusion. But it does mean the version of this story that spread widest, small deposits systematically freezing multiple industry insiders' accounts, doesn't currently have verifiable on-chain evidence behind it, and the one user whose specific claim could theoretically be checked against the record hasn't provided the information that would let anyone actually confirm it. Until Ziye shares that deposit address, or someone else corroborates a similar experience with evidence attached, this looks a lot more like an unverified claim that traveled faster than anyone checked it, rather than the systemic compliance problem it was initially framed as.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. Follow us on X @nulltxnews
