A while ago, I saw a shocking news story: COBINHOOD founder Chen Tai-yuan was splashed with white paint in Xinyi District. On the surface, it looked like a debt dispute, but the story behind it is much more complicated than a street altercation.

According to reports, that day, Chen Tai-yuan parked his car in Xinyi District and was about to enter a building when he was splashed with white paint by two men in black in a blind spot of the surveillance camera, then they fled. He told the police that his car had been fitted with a GPS tracker since March this year, and suspects that this attack was premeditated. But honestly, the real issue might be more than just this incident.

To understand why this happened, we need to look back at the history of Chen Tai-yuan and COBINHOOD. When they first launched the exchange, they didn’t hold back on spending, renting the 39th floor of Taipei 101 as their headquarters, which once made them quite prominent in the blockchain startup scene. But over time, various problems began to surface—personally, there was a lawsuit against his ex-fiancée for credit card fraud, and the incident where a Lamborghini worth 17 million was driven into a rice field. On the corporate side, there were ongoing disputes over equity, and internal conflicts caused employee morale to plummet.

In the first half of 2019, COBINHOOD and related project DEXON announced their dissolution. The team that was once highly anticipated collapsed just like that, which was a significant blow to Taiwan’s entire blockchain ecosystem. After the dissolution, the platform still claimed that trading operations continued, but in reality, market making had stopped, and trading volume plummeted. Co-founder Huang Wei-ning subsequently left, leaving Chen Tai-yuan as the sole member of the executive team.

Things reached a climax in February—COBINHOOD officially shut down its exchange. Once the news broke, overseas advocacy communities exploded in outrage, with many investors worried that Chen Tai-yuan had fled with the funds. Investors in COB tokens on the platform began to seek help but found no way out, which is the real problem. From this perspective, the street conflict Chen Tai-yuan experienced might just be superficial; behind it are a crisis of investor trust and tangled interests among various parties.