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Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) announced that he is completely abandoning his public wallet. A routine attempt to clear spam tokens from the wallet turned into a $30 million market frenzy reminiscent of the famous Shiba Inu (SHIB) scenario, forcing the Binance founder to take radical measures.
How a routine cleanup became a pump
Earlier today, Lookonchain analysts noticed that CZ had burned 4,444 tokens from each of two third-party projects from his BNB Chain address. Speculators immediately interpreted this as a hidden on-chain signal, undeterred by the fact that one of the burned assets was an unofficial clone.
The market capitalization of the virtually dead coin surged from $40,000 to $30 million, with its price rising vertically by more than 30,000%, while the legitimate version of the token traded on Binance Alpha remained completely stable.
The market craze can be explained by the on-chain psychology surrounding the Shiba Inu pump in 2021, when Vitalik Buterin burned SHIB tokens sent to him by the project's creators, triggering a historic supply shortage.
In CZ's case, the coin creators similarly flooded his wallet with spam tokens to promote their projects using his name, hoping to repeat that story.
The Streisand effect and CZ's reaction
Changpeng Zhao urged the community to stop "over-interpreting" his actions, explaining that he was simply testing the Trust Wallet app and trying to remove junk tokens that were preventing him from finding his BNB balance. However, his attempt to dispose of the tokens manually produced a Streisand effect.
As the Binance founder himself admitted, he quickly realized that the fight was futile: "The more I burn, the more people will send meme coins to the address." Because of the blockchain's transparency, every transaction he made triggered false speculation, while new spam tokens continued arriving at an exponential rate.
To put a definitive end to the manipulation surrounding his name, CZ decided to empty the wallet completely, with all legitimate BNB holdings and associated tokens being donated to his educational charity project, Giggle Academy.
After that, Zhao will stop using the address entirely, officially turning it into a classic "burn address." Any coins that scammers send there in the future will be locked forever, with no possibility of withdrawal.
Following the announcement, the chart of the surging clone reacted immediately. A wave of panic selling is now underway, and the asset's market capitalization has already collapsed back to $5.26 million.
U.Today Editorial Team
Dan Burgin
