Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (창펑 자오), known as CZ, said controversy over a large movement of meme coins from his public wallet was not about backing a specific project or intervening in prices, but about clearing out spam tokens.

Blockchain media outlet U.Today reported on July 13 that about 400 million tokens issued by a third party were sent from Zhao's public wallet to a burn address (0x000...). The assets are estimated to be worth about $1.6 million.

After on-chain analysts spotted the transaction, speculation emerged in the market that CZ might be supporting a BNB Chain-based meme coin or sponsoring a specific project.

Zhao denied that interpretation on X, formerly Twitter. He said, "All I did was throw out digital trash." He explained that third-party projects had sent spam tokens to his public wallet for years, to the point that the wallet interface could not even display the balance properly.

This was not the first such action. According to on-chain analytics platform Arkham, Zhao's public wallet has long been a target for projects distributing spam tokens. CZ has repeatedly gathered such tokens after a certain period and sent them to a burn address. About 8 months ago, he was found to have burned tokens in three transfers worth about $43,490, $142,500 and $305,870, respectively.

A year ago, there was a larger cleanup. At that time, four large transfers moved tokens worth about $358,220, $1.95 million, $546,900 and $1.1 million, respectively, to a so-called "black hole address". Over the past year, the cumulative value of third-party spam tokens Zhao has burned directly was tallied at more than $6.24 million.

Such spam token distribution is one of the promotional methods commonly used in the cryptocurrency industry. Issuers send tokens without permission to a celebrity's public wallet to make it appear the person holds the tokens or to draw attention.

A representative case is an incident in 2021 in which the Shiba Inu (SHIB) development team sent half of the total supply to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. At the time, Buterin burned about 90 percent of the SHIB he received and publicly asked developers to stop sending him tokens without his consent.

Zhao also pointed to the same problem. He said, "Sending tokens to my address is no different from sending them to the black hole address," adding, "There is no difference other than reducing one intermediate step."

With this explanation, recent large token movements are being seen more as an effort to clear out long-accumulated spam tokens than as a transaction to support a specific meme coin or intervene in the market.

Still, the industry is also pointing out that spam token marketing using celebrities' public wallets continues to be repeated, and that interpreting on-chain transactions requires looking not only at the size of a transfer but also at a token's issuance background and the purpose of the transfer.

"It's not that complicated. I hadn't looked at that wallet for a long time. When I opened it, I found there were too many tokens (more than 10,000), and the software display was not very user-friendly. I made a suggestion and then did a test again. Sending to my address is not as good as sending directly into the black hole, reducing one step and being more direct and effective: 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD https://t.co/sumv5W8jqe"