Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has denied rumors of secretly backing meme coins on BNB Chain, after sending 400 million spam tokens worth $1.6 million to a burn address. The transfers sparked manipulation theories, but on-chain data reveals a routine cleanup that has been repeating for years. A burn address is a wallet without an accessible private key, so any tokens sent to it are removed from circulation forever.
Token Cleanup
CZ moved roughly 400 million units of third-party tokens into one of these addresses, with the batch totaling $1.6 million. The destination was the well-known dead address starting with 0x000, a common target for permanent token removal. On-chain researchers flagged the transfers, and theories about market manipulation quickly began circulating.
Clarification
However, CZ promptly clarified on X that he was simply clearing out digital garbage accumulated in his public wallet. He explained that creators of third-party projects had been sending spam tokens to his address for years, chasing free publicity. As a result, the wallet interface eventually stopped displaying his balance correctly, forcing the manual cleanup. Burning the tokens directly removes clutter in a single step, without selling or transferring each asset individually.
Precedent
The most famous precedent involved Vitalik Buterin in 2021, where Shiba Inu’s team transferred an enormous share of the supply to the Ethereum co-founder without asking him. Instead of validating the project, he burned 90% of those holdings and publicly asked developers to abandon the practice. CZ now faces the same dynamic on a recurring basis, with his wallet having absorbed unwanted tokens for years, forcing periodic purges of ever-increasing size. Altogether, the Binance founder has erased more than $6.24 million in spam assets over the past twelve months.
Based on reporting from crypto.news.
