A Chinese national controls a crypto trading platform with 28 million users worldwide — and Washington just got around to noticing. Shares of Webull cratered 19% Wednesday after the bipartisan House Select Committee on China dropped a 23-page report confirming what should have been obvious: the discount broker's ownership, infrastructure, data routing, and financing are structurally tied to the People's Republic of China.
The stake for ordinary Americans is plain. You open an app to trade crypto, you hand over your financial data, your device info, your transaction history — and that information may flow through infrastructure answerable to Beijing, not Washington. The committee report, titled "Free Trades, Hidden Ties Exposing Webull's China Links," states that "Webull's ownership architecture, technical workforce, technology infrastructure, cross-border data routing, corporate financing, and compliance frameworks are tied in structural ways to the People's Republic of China." Webull's data practices, the committee warns, "expose American investors to PRC legal and surveillance risk."
Founder, chairman, and CEO Anquan Wang — a Chinese national — controls 79.2% of the company's voting power through a dual-class share structure. He can "control the election of directors and other major corporate decisions requiring shareholder approval," the report notes. Webull has previously described itself as "both a US and Chinese company." The stock has tanked 76% since its SPAC debut early last year.
Webull denies the allegations. A company spokesperson said the report contains "significant inaccuracies and unsupported conclusions" and complained the committee didn't contact Webull for more than 20 months before publishing. Webull insists its U.S. business operates from St. Petersburg, Florida, and New York City, and that American customer data is stored domestically with access controlled by U.S. personnel.
Notably, the spokesperson didn't specify what those "inaccuracies" were when pressed by the New York Post.
Here is the structural problem: while Congress and regulators have spent years tightening the screws on American crypto platforms and domestic fintech, a Beijing-linked operation amassed 28 million users under minimal scrutiny. The committee's own report acknowledges concerns have been escalating "in recent years" — so what took so long? The revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they oversee produces a particular kind of blindness: domestic platforms get compliance armies and enforcement actions; foreign-tied platforms get the benefit of the doubt until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, Big Tech is handling Chinese-linked competitors on its own terms. Meta this week banned all ByteDance advertisements — covering TikTok and its sister properties — across its platforms in the U.S. and six other countries. "We don't have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps," Meta said. Whether that's principled or just competitive maneuvering, it's more action than Washington managed for years.
The open question: will this report produce actual structural accountability — data audits, ownership limits, forced divestiture — or will it sit on a shelf while Webull continues operating under Anquan Wang's unchecked control?
