CZ Unfollows in Bulk: Is the Absurd "Follow Business" Completely Doomed?

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Author: zhou, ChainCatcher

On November 10, a comparison chart of X followers ignited a heated discussion in the crypto community. Binance founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) unfollowed over 300 accounts from his X account in less than two months, a number far exceeding the usual maintenance, which was seen as a precise cleanup and revealed a hidden yet once highly active gray industry chain: accounts followed by CZ were once publicly traded 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 it was just cleaning up inactive accounts, and then publicly stated not to buy accounts that I follow, promising to unfollow immediately if they are found to be sold. The community has 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 a few thousand dollars being common.

It is worth mentioning that Oracle is a typical case of buying accounts to gain traffic and eventually running away with the money. According to reports, on October 10, 2025, the Oracle project team disappeared with the funds, and the account ceased operations. Community investigations show that Oracle was likely obtained through “buying accounts” (originally an old account in CZ's关注列表), the buyer renamed it, changed the avatar, issued tokens, and used the residual halo to inflate the price, only to be clarified by Four Meme that it was not a partner, ultimately leading to the exit.

On the surface, this seems like a farce of account trading, but in reality, it exposes deep-seated issues of attention distortion in the industry and the extreme marketing methods of project parties.

As one of the largest platforms in terms of trading volume globally, Binance's token listing review process has long been criticized for its vague standards, with decision-making power highly concentrated among a few executives or internal teams. On the surface, mechanisms such as community voting and budget transparency provide a fair entry opportunity, but in reality, the final decisions are still controlled manually (compliance review, liquidity assessment, risk control judgment); the opportunities for small projects to gain exposure through formal channels often seem more like products of internal relationships or the personal preferences of the boss rather than the objective strength of the project itself. This directly leads to extreme choices by project teams, spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy an account “watched by CZ,” where a rebranding can attract traffic far more effectively than spending months polishing a product or building a community.

At the same time, this phenomenon also reflects a systematic distortion of attention in the industry, with a lack of effective evaluation mechanisms, making traffic a hard currency. Retail investors tend to treat celebrity dynamics as endorsements, and project parties no longer compete based on code quality, on-chain data, or long-term planning, but rather on who can seize hot topics faster, leading the industry into a vicious cycle of “the less transparent it is, the more it relies on connections, and the more it relies on shortcuts.”

The editor pointed out in the article “What Happened to the People Following CZ?” that the so-called calls are just a spark, while the community riding on concepts adds fuel to the fire, and the combination of the two ignited the market. This also indicates that the market itself needs hot topics to maintain attention and liquidity. Whether it is public calls or “invisible endorsements” in the watchlist, under an immature evaluation mechanism, both can become short-term FOMO drivers.

CZ's recent purge serves as a wake-up call for the industry in a certain sense: when projects no longer rely on the preferences of a specific person or platform for exposure, project teams will return to focusing on the product itself, and retail investors will learn to assess value using data.

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