Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (창펑 자오) has decided to permanently shut down his public wallet, South Korean crypto outlet U.Today reported on Saturday. The move follows market confusion after a process to clear spam tokens helped drive the market value of a meme coin from $40,000 to $30 million.

Earlier, on-chain analytics firm Lookonchain detected that Zhao’s BNB Chain wallet burned 4,444 tokens each from 2 different projects. Investors interpreted it as a hidden on-chain signal, and the price of the token, which had effectively stopped trading, surged more than 30,000 percent. The price of the official version of the token traded on Binance Alpha was unchanged.

The episode resembled a 2021 case in which Vitalik Buterin burned Shiba Inu (SHIB) sent to him, triggering a price surge. It began when people tied to the projects sent spam tokens to Zhao’s wallet to promote them by using the CZ name.

Zhao said he was testing the Trust Wallet app and removed unnecessary tokens that interfered with checking balances. But the more he burned, the more new meme coins were sent, fuelling speculative sentiment.

Zhao will donate normal BNB and tokens held in the wallet to Giggle Academy, an education charity project, and stop using the address. Any assets sent to the address after that will be locked permanently. The market value of the token that had surged fell to $5.26 million immediately after the announcement.