CHART: Returns of memecoins attributed to CZ since leaving prison
After finishing his prison term and receiving Donald Trump’s most contentious pardon, crypto traders anointed Binance’s billionaire founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) a meme lord.
Pausing a few weeks to compose himself and reconnect to the internet after four months offline, CZ decided that despite his criminal guilty plea, he would continue to participate in the crypto industry.
Naturally, the easiest way to profit from CZ’s return was to trade his memecoins.
His naïveté about platforms like Pump Fun was as endearing to newcomers as it was lucrative to experienced traders. CZ was imprisoned or offline during most of the 2024 bubble in Pump Fun memecoins, and his inexperience showed.
Although CZ missed the boat during 2024’s wave of Pump Fun memecoin excitement, he certainly participated in 2025.
Indeed, he even used a BNB Chain Pump Fun competitor, Four.meme.
With and without his explicit endorsement, traders placed millions of dollars worth of bets on dozens of CZ-related memecoins.
They even tried, with debatable success, to trade memecoins on his BNB Chain — a major deviation from Solana-based tools.
Performance of memecoins attributed to CZ
Protos has compiled an incomplete list of memecoins attributable to CZ and Binance. Some earned an explicit endorsement by CZ, while others were tacit or community-interpreted.
They’ve traded Broccoli and other guesses about the name of CZ’s dog, Test (an ostensible test coin that became a real memecoin), GIGGLE (one of CZ’s companies), swastika (Binance’s momentary hashflag), 4 (based on CZ’s four-fingered hand signal), PALU, CZLU, SCI6900, and many others.
Earlier this year, when memecoins were far trendier, traders were gambling at all hours of the day on any CZ tweet.
Traders pleaded for a clear “CA” or contract address that they could paste into memecoin trading platforms like Pump Fun.
Playfully, the billionaire tried to tweet vaguely to maintain plausible ignorance over the massive effects his tweets were having on crypto markets. Traders talked about apeing in — trading lingo for degenerately buying something with no due diligence.
The billionaire, out of practice from his months in prison, even admitted to botching the release of a memecoin.
By absolute count, most of the memecoins attributable to CZ were user-created in February 2025 and were inspired by speculation about the name of his dog.
Hundreds of memecoins for CZ’s dog reveal
Traders created hundreds of memecoins around CZ’s February 13 pet name reveal, often with the same ticker symbol yet distinct CAs. Incorrect guesses included Cleo, Brownie, Perry, Toro, Floki, Ziggy, and many others.
Once CZ confirmed the name of his dog, users created hundreds of Broccoli memecoins.
Although these coins are certainly attributable to CZ, Protos has excluded almost all of them from the data set due to their sheer number and the lack of direct posts from him, so as to not skew already negative results even more bearishly.
Hundreds have drawdowns exceeding 99% from their momentary highs.
In terms of Broccoli itself, CZ certainly endorsed related memecoins, however, he didn’t endorse a single pick. Instead, he supported multiple memecoins with that name.
On February 13, 2025 at 11:12am New York time, CZ purposefully posted the name of his dog, knowing that users were ready to trade its name as a memecoin, without specifying a particular CA.
He endorsed all variants encouragingly saying, “let the best in the community win.”
CZ later apologized for their haphazard launches. As a conservative sample from this destructive time period, Protos included the top three Broccoli memecoins by market cap and trading volume, per CoinGecko, in the chart above.
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