On November 10th, a comparative chart of X follower counts ignited discussions within the crypto community. In less than two months, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) unfollowed over three hundred accounts from his X profile. This number, far exceeding routine maintenance, was seen as a targeted purge and exposed a previously hidden yet highly active grey industry chain: accounts followed by CZ were once publicly traded for tens of thousands of dollars.
According to crypto data platform RootData, on November 8th-9th, CZ conducted a concentrated unfollowing spree of a batch of accounts, which included formerly active projects on the BNB Chain such as BakerySwap and ReachMe. CZ initially responded that he was merely cleaning up inactive accounts, but later publicly stated, "Do not buy accounts I follow. If I find they are being sold, I will unfollow immediately." 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 or several thousand dollars being commonplace.
It is worth mentioning that "Oracle" is a typical case of buying an account to gain traffic, only to ultimately abscond with funds. Reportedly, on October 10, 2025, the Oracle project team disappeared with the funds, and the account ceased operations. Community investigations suggested that the Oracle account was likely acquired through a "purchase" (originally an old account from CZ's follow list). The buyer reportedly took over the account, changed its name and avatar, issued a token, and leveraged its residual credibility to inflate the price. It was later clarified by Four Moons that Oracle was not a partner, before the project ultimately rug-pulled.
On the surface, this is a farce of account trading, but in reality, it exposes deeper issues of distorted industry attention and extreme marketing tactics by projects. On one hand, small projects struggle to gain exposure through legitimate channels, directly fostering extreme choices: spending tens of thousands to buy a "CZ-followed" account, rebranding it, and harvesting traffic is far more cost-effective than spending months refining a product or building a community.
On the other hand, this phenomenon also reflects a systemic distortion in industry attention. The lack of effective evaluation mechanisms has made traffic the hard currency. Retail investors habitually treat celebrity actions as endorsements, and projects no longer compete primarily on code quality, on-chain data, or long-term planning, but rather on who can faster capitalize on hype.
As noted by the editor in the article "What Happened to Those Who Copied CZ's Trades?", so-called call-outs are merely a spark, while the community's bandwagoning adds the fuel; it's the combination that ignites the market trend. This also indicates that the market itself requires hype to maintain attention and liquidity. Whether through public call-outs or the "implicit endorsement" within a follow list, in the absence of mature evaluation mechanisms, both can become short-term FOMO catalysts.
In a sense, CZ's massive cleanup also serves as a wake-up call for the industry: only when project exposure no longer relies on the preferences of an individual or a specific platform will projects return their focus to the product itself, and will retail investors learn to use data to assess value.
