Traders blame CZ for ending BNB memecoin season
Several crypto influencers blamed Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for nuking a long list of memecoins this week after he unveiled a BNB Chain memecoin launchpad called Meme Rush.
According to some interpretations of the news, Meme Rush would give users who passed know your customer (KYC) checks the earliest access to buy at the best, pre-bonding curve prices.
Today, he disclaimed responsibility for being the center of attention in the first place, although he declined to correct the record about which groups would have permission to buy launchpad memecoins via Meme Rush at the lowest market capitalizations.
“I just tweet normally,” Zhao claimed. “Any overlap to memes is coincidental, not endorsement.”
Traders posted a sea of red percentage changes across BNB memecoin leaderboards and condolences for suffering traders.
Many looked for explanations as to why Zhao’s backpedaling post had such disastrous consequences for the speculative niche.
To understand how a single person could nuke a trading season, we need to be aware of Zhao’s rise to prominence among memecoin traders. Indeed, a confluence of factors contributed to a trading frenzy on the blockchain he founded, BNB Chain.
The sudden popularity of BNB memecoins
First, his blockchain’s proprietary token, BNB, hit an all-time high yesterday and briefly surpassed tether (USDT) to become the world’s third-largest crypto asset above $180 billion.
Year to date, BNB has soared 72% — more than any other top 20 coin.
Second, Binance launched a variety of programs to support memecoins, including Meme Rush, a partnership with memecoin launchpad and Pump.fun competitor Four.Meme, as well as Binance Wallet support for “exclusive early access to meme token launches.”
Binance Alpha is also contributing to this season’s daytrading frenzy. The program is a way to buy memecoins within the Binance Wallet app and Binance Alpha 2.0 will integrate trading of memecoins on Binance’s main exchange.
Zhao also contributed to the growing number of BNB memecoins by supporting Aster, a Hyperliquid competitor that offers spot trading and highly leveraged, perpetually-rolling futures contracts or “perps” with limited registration and KYC requirements.
Net negative for BNB traders
Lastly, Zhao himself has been at the center of influence. Almost by the day, traders would trade memecoins based on single words or images posted by the billionaire — even without his explicit endorsement.
By September, crypto traders were calling Zhao the main character on X, noticing his virality and considering modifying their trading hours to accommodate his sleep schedule.
Read more: Is Aster just CZ taking Binance on-chain?
After he nuked many BNB memecoins yesterday, Zhao quote-tweeted a disclaimer by a leader of Aster, the BNB Chain memecoin exchange that his family office YZI Labs backed.
Aster’s leader cautioned against a number of dangerous trends that had become popular among BNB memecoin traders: giving portions of new memecoins to Zhao’s wallet as a way to feign credibility, or parsing his posts for a word to “look for a memecoin with that word and buy it.”
Although the caution earned over 1.2 million impressions, its timing seemed to be late.
“Every time we’re finally having fun on BNB, CZ pulls some weird stuff,” one trader reacted. “Net negative for BNB traders. No other way to put it.”
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