Key Takeaways
- A trader turned $9,700 into $282,000, a 29x return, by tracking CZ’s public wallet.
- CZ’s token burn sent Marscoin surging to a $30 million market cap on August 16.
- CZ shut down and burned his public wallet after the frenzy, donating its funds to Giggle Academy.
How the Trade Worked
According to onchain data flagged by Lookonchain, a wallet spent 16 BNB, about $9,645, along with roughly $10 in gas fees to buy 84.61 million Marscoin tokens within seconds of CZ burning 4,444 Marscoin from his own public address. The trader then ran what Lookonchain described as a “2x and take out the initial investment” strategy, selling half the position, 42.3 million tokens, for 16.4 BNB to recover the original stake before letting the rest ride.
The remaining 42.3 million tokens were later sold for 465 BNB, worth about $282,000, leaving the trader with a 29x return and the most profitable wallet on Marscoin.
Not Everyone Won
A separate tracked wallet FOMO’d into Marscoin after seeing CZ’s burn, spending 133,000 USDT to buy 6.15 million tokens. When CZ subsequently posted that he would stop using the public address, the token crashed more than 90%, and the trader closed out the position for just 22,400 USDT, a loss of roughly $110,700 in about two hours.
The burns that triggered the frenzy were never meant to be a signal. CZ has said he was simply using the Trust Wallet app for routine spam-token cleanup on an address market participants had started watching for clues. Speculators read the burns of two unrelated, third-party BNB Chain tokens as a sign of intent, and one unofficial Marscoin clone spiked from a $40,000 market cap to $30 million, a gain of more than 30,000%, before collapsing back to roughly $5.26 million once the burns were revealed as routine housekeeping.
“The more I burn, the more people will send meme coins to the address,” CZ acknowledged, describing a feedback loop he said he couldn’t easily stop. Rather than keep managing the attention, CZ moved his legitimate BNB holdings to Giggle Academy, his education-focused charity, and converted the wallet into a permanent burn address, closing it to future transactions entirely.
It isn’t the first time CZ’s public activity has moved memecoin markets, or the first time he’s had to publicly warn traders against reading too much into his posts. In any case, the entire development has once again become a reminder of how thin the line has become between a founder’s routine wallet maintenance and a market-moving signal.
