Binance has responded to allegations that it stole the idea for its new AI NFT platform, Bicasso, from a South Korean firm that won the BNB Chain Hackathon.
Just two months after winning the BNB Chain hackathon in Seoul in December 2022, Chatcasso has come out with accusations against Binance. The South Korean firm said Binance copied its AI-based NFT creation tool and rebranded it to Bicasso.
Bicasso beta version launched on March 1st and was announced via a tweet by the company's CEO, Chanpeng "CZ" Zhao. Binance's CEO described it as a tool to “turn creative visions into NFTs with AI.” However, it may not be of their own creation. One of the members of Chatcasso, called ggoma, tweeted that Binance stole their idea.
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The community member added that he hoped “Binance realizes the impact of their actions and takes steps to right their wrongs.” He warned others to be wary that big companies often try to “take advantage of <their> hard work.”
Binance has denied the allegations. According to a Binance representative, Bicasso was an experimental project created by a small team of developers at the company. The representative added that AI and NFTs were concepts being explored by many industry players.
Binance stated that a resemblance of ideas is not proof of theft. The exchange’s spokesperson noted:
Despite the similarities, after conducting an internal review, we’re confident that Bicasso was designed and developed independently more than two weeks before the BNB hackathon.
Regardless of the controversy, Bicasso has proved to be quite popular with the non-fungible token (NFT) community. During the beta launch, the tool minted 10,000 NFTs in just 2.5 hours.
Thus far, Binance's ongoing legal troubles and the latest controversy over Bicasso may have slightly affected the price of BNB. At the time of writing, BNB retails for $286.42, recording a 2.41% price decrease in the last 24 hours.
