Binance founder Changpeng Zhao is emptying and permanently retiring his public wallet after a routine token cleanup accidentally sent a copycat meme coin surging in value. The wallet's remaining holdings go to his Giggle Academy charity, and the address will then become a burn address that locks any coins sent to it forever.
A cleanup that turned into a $30 million frenzy
Changpeng Zhao (CZ) announced he is completely abandoning his public wallet. Earlier today, Lookonchain analysts noticed that CZ had burned 4,444 tokens from each of two third-party projects tied to his BNB Chain address. Speculators immediately read the burns as a hidden signal, even though one of the assets was an unofficial clone.
As a result, the clone's market capitalization surged from $40,000 to $30 million, with its price rising vertically by more than 30,000%. The legitimate version of the token traded on Binance Alpha stayed stable. The episode echoes the Shiba Inu (SHIB) burn craze, when Vitalik Buterin's disposal of tokens sent to him triggered a similar supply-shortage frenzy. In CZ's case, the coin's creators had flooded his wallet with spam tokens to promote their project using his name, hoping for a repeat.
CZ's reaction and the Streisand effect
CZ urged the community to stop "over-interpreting" his actions, explaining he was only testing the Trust Wallet app while trying to clear junk tokens blocking his BNB balance. However, his manual attempt to dispose of the tokens produced a Streisand effect instead. According to U.Today, he warned: "The more I burn, the more people will send meme coins to the address." Because the blockchain is transparent, every transaction he made triggered fresh speculation, and new spam tokens kept arriving at an exponential rate.
To end the manipulation around his name for good, CZ decided to empty the wallet completely, donating all legitimate BNB holdings and associated tokens to his educational charity project, Giggle Academy. After that, he will stop using the address entirely, turning it into a classic burn address — any coins scammers send there afterward will be locked forever with no possibility of withdrawal.
Following the announcement, the surging clone's chart reacted immediately, and panic selling pushed its market capitalization back down to $5.26 million.
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