Author: flowie, ChainCatcher
CZ seems quite aggrieved, why did the tweet he casually forwarded cause such a big controversy.
And crypto users are also puzzled, why would CZ, who has nearly 100 million followers, risk forwarding a tweet about a suspected scam coin, even making some users confused, "CZ must have been hacked."
A community user jokingly said that the two most powerful men in crypto lately have been driving people crazy, apart from Trump who keeps shouting "the big one is coming", there is also CZ who keeps saying "I don't know, I don't understand, it's not me..."
As one of the biggest Chinese leaders in crypto, known as "Cousin", CZ's rift with the community users seems to be gradually emerging. Frequent meme failures, inadvertently endorsing controversial projects, CZ has fallen into the dilemma of saying too much and making too many mistakes.
Frequent meme failures
CZ has stumbled again on memes.
After the pet dog meme debacle and the controversy over the meme experiment coin TST, yesterday afternoon, CZ forwarded a comment on a celebrity meme coin, which got him into trouble again.
Recommended reading《The Meme Annual Farce Triggered by CZ's Pet Dog, Ending in a Chorus of Curses》;《Full Review of the TST Incident: From Community Carnival to Binance Controversy, A Microcosm of the Crypto Market》
CZ forwarded a tweet by football star Ronaldinho promoting the STAR10 token, emphasizing that this is an exclusive token on the BNB Chain, and He Yi also forwarded the tweet.
Possibly due to CZ and co-founder He Yi's comments and reposts, the token's market cap quickly surpassed $350 million from $200 million.
But less than an hour later, while some community users were immersed in the new meme crypto fortune endorsed by CZ, the token was exposed by user @R10coin_ as a suspected "plate" coin from Shenzhen, a token that Ronaldinho had sold the X account to a Shenzhen "coin issuing" team for $5 million to promote.
Blockchain security company GoPlus Security also issued a user security alert, saying that STAR10 has serious security risks and the owner can destroy any holder's tokens.
Although CZ's forwarded tweet clearly stated that there was no endorsement and warned users to be aware of the risks, the community users did not seem to buy CZ's disclaimer.
A Twitter user commented that you can't pretend to be innocent by adding "this is not an endorsement", at the end of the day you just want to bring more trading volume back to the BNB Chain, but you don't really care that these celebrity (coins) will soon leave the buyers with nothing.
What puzzles many crypto users even more is, why didn't CZ have the ability to identify a token with obvious fraud suspicions?
Ronaldinho's personal life has been tarnished and his business reputation has always been poor, repeatedly "raising money" without scruples through football training, business appearances and other means around the world. And before CZ's retweet, there were already Twitter users @gokunocool exposing that Ronaldinho was allegedly colluding with a Shenzhen team to promote the token.
CZ's approach of using celebrity coins and memes to drive the growth of the BNB Chain has also been questioned.
Crypto KOL @huahuayjy, who focuses on the BNB Chain ecosystem, warned that Solana's recent decline started with all kinds of celebrity token launches, and celebrity token launches by conspiracy groups cannot bring users to the BNB Chain, but will harm the BNB Chain. He hopes CZ will still focus more on supporting native BNB Chain projects.
After the public opinion fermented, CZ seemed a bit puzzled and even aggrieved, attributing the controversy to "cultural differences".
CZ even suggested "maybe we shouldn't post in Chinese in the future?", and crypto KOL @thankUcrypto refuted that this was completely a misattribution, the mistake should be the act of forwarding, which allowed the fraud scheme to gain traffic, but to attribute it to language and cultural differences is wrong.
CZ has also inadvertently offended Chinese users, with Chinese community users directly saying "don't forget that Binance was supported by Chinese users."
Saying too much, CZ in a dilemma
CZ's recent statements or actions have also frequently caused controversy. In summary, it mainly revolves around the following three aspects:
- Endorsing controversial projects: In addition to tweeting for Ronaldinho's celebrity coin yesterday, CZ also endorsed the controversial blockchain security company Certik at the end of last year.
- Sudden "experiments" that upset players: Teasing with the broccoli pet dog meme, the TST test coin that crashed the market after listing; the new token issuance mechanism proposal was questioned as "treating the symptoms but not the root cause" and even outdated;
- Some low-level mistakes or confusing operations: Mistakenly thinking that BNB on Hashkey Global was the Hong Kong-approved BNB; claiming he just used a DEX for the first time recently.
Perhaps the overall market downturn and the wealth effect of Binance on exchanges and chains have to some extent exaggerated the community users' perception of CZ being "out of touch".
But the persistent community user dissatisfaction may really force CZ to reflect on the problems within.
Regarding CZ's recent predicament of trying hard on memes but stumbling, crypto KOL @Sea_Bitcoin analyzed that at the end of the day it was just wanting to use memes to drive traffic to the BNB Chain, with too much short-term utilitarianism, and the actions became distorted.
Bingwa believes this is a disconnect in cognition, not understanding the logic of the community. In his view, CZ is like the mindset of a 500 Fortune executive in Web2, often accustomed to completely separating factual statements and value judgments, thinking that forwarding news does not represent a stance.
"But the community's logic is a kind of decentralized traffic logic language, where silence means acquiescence, speaking out means endorsement, and denial is tantamount to indirect certification."
CZ's frequent "out of touch" may also expose the information cocoon brought by "big company disease". The most controversial today is probably this tweet that is extremely supportive of CZ, making the original contradictions even more intense.
Twitter users like @Btman_Jeff even accused CZ of not having a spokesperson, leading to information bias.
So how to truly embrace the market and the community?
A month ago, crypto KOL Yuyue also provided suggestions for CZ, that compared to getting cognition from his employees, it would be better to have 4-5 telephone meetings per month with the top senior players in the market to get real insights from the market frontiers.
