Written by: zhou, ChainCatcher
On November 10, a comparison chart of X followers ignited heated discussions in the crypto community. Binance founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) unfollowed over three hundred accounts from his X account in less than two months, a number far exceeding regular maintenance, which was seen as a precise cleanup and revealed a hidden yet once very active gray industry chain: accounts followed by CZ were previously traded publicly for tens of thousands of dollars.
Image source: X user @FORAB_
According to the crypto data statistics platform RootData, on November 8-9, CZ unfollowed a batch of accounts, including active projects on the BNB chain such as BakerySwap and ReachMe. CZ initially responded that he was just cleaning up inactive accounts, but later publicly stated not to buy accounts he follows, and if any were found for sale, he would immediately unfollow. The community also reported that during the bull market, the highest transaction price for a single account followed by CZ reached $80,000, with cases of $20,000 and several thousand dollars being common.
It is worth mentioning that Oracle is a typical case of buying accounts to gain traffic and ultimately running away with the money. It is reported that on October 10, 2025, the Oracle project team disappeared with the funds, and the account ceased operations. Community investigations indicate that Oracle likely acquired its status by "buying accounts" (originally an old account on CZ's follow list), and after the buyer took over, they renamed it, changed the avatar, issued tokens, and used the residual halo to inflate prices, only to be clarified by Four Meme that they were not partners, ultimately leading to their exit.
On the surface, this is a farce of account trading, but it actually exposes deeper issues of attention distortion in the industry and extreme marketing methods by project teams. On one hand, small projects find it difficult to gain exposure through regular channels, directly prompting extreme choices by project teams to spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy an account "followed by CZ," rebranding it to harvest traffic, which is far more cost-effective than spending months refining products or building communities.
On the other hand, this phenomenon also reflects the systemic distortion of attention in the industry, where the lack of an effective evaluation mechanism has turned traffic into hard currency. Retail investors tend to treat celebrity dynamics as endorsements, and project teams are no longer competing on code quality, on-chain data, or long-term planning, but rather on who can seize the spotlight faster.
The editor also pointed out in the article "What Happened to Those Who Followed CZ?" that the so-called "shouting orders" is just a spark, while the community riding the concept adds fuel to the fire, and when the two meet, it ignites the market. This also indicates that the market itself needs hot topics to maintain attention and liquidity. Whether it is public shouting orders or "invisible endorsements" in the follow list, under an immature evaluation mechanism, both can become short-term FOMO catalysts.
CZ's recent purge, in a sense, serves as a wake-up call for the industry: when project exposure no longer relies on the preferences of a single person or platform, project teams will return to the product itself, and retail investors will learn to judge value using data.
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