Donations for ZachXBT’s Legal Defense Reach $1M Target in Less Than Three Days

Support is pouring in from the cryptocurrency ecosystem to help blockchain sleuth ZachXBT in his legal defense against a defamation lawsuit.

For his defense, in what ZachXBT called on Twitter “a classic David & Goliath story,” the crypto detective turned to the greater community to help amass funds to pay attorneys, which could “easily exceed $1m USD,” he said.

Widely known for exposing scams in the crypto space, ZachXBT’s plea for help did not go unheard. He reached that $1M milestone just three days after providing the ETH address for supporters to direct their donations.

The wallet he pointed to for donations held just over $1M spread across various digital assets including ETH, and stablecoins USDC, USDT, TUSD, and DAI, on Saturday afternoon New York time.

MachiBigBrother Claims

The suit was brought against ZachXBT by Jeffrey Huang, also known as MachiBigBrother, who said claims he played a role in orchestrating the embezzlement of some 22,000 ETH from Formosa Financial in 2018 are false.

The suit is a response to a heavily sourced medium article from June 2022 by ZachXBT, which details the alleged embezzlement as well as “over ten failed pump and dump tokens and NFT projects” Huang is said to have associated with.

Huang summarily denies the claims.

Community Rallies

Early on a number of notable blockchain projects and accounts pledged support in spirit and with donations.

About 20% of donations came from a anonymously created ZACH token, according to Tom Wan, research analyst at 21.co. ZACH token charges a 2% tax for anyone who trades the token on Uniswap V2, and sends the tax in ETH to ZachXBT's donation wallet.

Attorneys Stephen Palley, Jess Meyers, and the team at Brown Rudnick signed on to represent ZachXBT.

“We’re proud to represent Zach and will vigorously defend his right to speak truth to power,” Palley said. “We will litigate the substance of the plaintiff’s claims in court, not on social media.”

If the case does go to a settlement, ZachXBT may have no trouble paying it off as the legal defense fund continues to accrue donations.