After serving his prison term and receiving President Donald Trump's most controversial pardon, crypto traders have anointed Binance's billionaire founder Chao Changpeng (CZ) the king of the meme.
After being offline for four months, CZ took a few weeks to calm down and reconnect to the internet, deciding to remain involved in the cryptocurrency industry despite his criminal guilty plea.
Naturally, the easiest way to profit from CZ's returns was to trade his meme coins.
CZ missed out on the Pump Fun meme coin excitement in 2024, but made up for it in 2025.
His naivety about platforms like Pump Fun was as appealing to beginners as it was to benefit experienced traders. Mr. CZ was incarcerated or offline for most of the 2024 Pump Fun Meme Coin Bubble, exposing his inexperience.
CZ missed the wave of Pump Fun meme coin excitement in 2024, but definitely joined in 2025.
In fact, he also used Four.meme, a competitor of BNB Chain Pump Fun.
With or without his explicit support, traders placed millions of dollars worth of bets on dozens of CZ-related meme coins.
They even attempted to trade meme coins on his BNB chain, which was controversially successful. A major departure from Solana-based tools.
Meme Coin Performance by CZ
Protoss has created an incomplete list of meme coins attributed to CZ and Binance. Some are explicitly endorsed by CZ, while others are implicit or interpreted by the community.
They exchanged other guesses about Broccoli, CZ's dog's name, Test (an ostensible test coin that became a bona fide meme coin), GIGGLE (one of CZ's companies), Swastika (Binance's instant hash flag), 4 (based on CZ's four-finger hand signal), PALU, CZLU, SCI6900, and many other names.
Most of the meme coins attributed to CZ were inspired by speculation about his dog's name.
Earlier this year, when meme coins were much more popular, traders were betting on CZ's tweets at all hours of the day.
Traders asked for a clear “CA” or contract address that could be pasted into memecoin trading platforms like Pump Fun.
Jokingly, the billionaire attempted to tweet vaguely in order to maintain plausible ignorance about the huge impact his tweets are having on the crypto market. Traders were talking about the misuse of trading terminology, which involves buying something corruptly without doing due diligence.
The billionaire even admitted that he failed to launch his meme coin after spending several months in prison, which left him with the habit.
In absolute numbers, Most of the meme coins attributed to CZ were created by users in February 2025 And inspired by speculation about his dog's name.
Hundreds of meme coins on CZ dog reveal
Traders created hundreds of meme coins before and after CZ's Feb. 13 nickname announcement, often with the same ticker symbol but different CAs. Wrong guesses included Cleo, Brownie, Perry, Toro, Floki, Ziggy, and many others.
Once CZ confirmed his dog's name, users created hundreds of broccoli meme coins.
While these coins are indeed attributed to CZ, Protoss has excluded almost all of them from the dataset due to their sheer number and lack of direct posts from him, so as not to skew the already negative results even more bearishly.
There are hundreds of stocks with drawdowns of more than 99% from their instantaneous highs.
As for Broccoli itself, CZ did endorse related meme coins, but not a single pick. Instead, he supported multiple meme coins with that name.
On February 13, 2025, at 11:12 a.m. New York time, CZ intentionally posted the name of his dog, knowing that users were prepared to trade the name as a meme coin without specifying a specific CA.
He encouraged all variants by saying:Let the best in the community win”
CZ later apologized for the unplanned release. As a conservative sample of this disruptive period, Protoss has included the top three broccoli meme coins by market capitalization and trading volume in the chart above, according to CoinGecko.
