CZ mass unfollowing: Has the absurd "attention business" completely cooled down?

Author: zhou, ChainCatcher

On November 10, a comparison chart of X followers ignited heated discussions in the crypto community. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) unfollowed over three hundred accounts from his X account in less than two months, a number far exceeding daily maintenance, which was seen as a precise cleanup and unveiled a hidden yet once very active gray industry chain: accounts followed by CZ were publicly traded for tens of thousands of dollars.

Image source: X user @_FORAB

According to crypto data statistics platform RootData, on November 8-9, CZ concentrated on unfollowing a batch of accounts, including active projects on the BNB chain such as BakerySwap and ReachMe. CZ initially responded that he was just cleaning up inactive accounts, but later publicly stated not to buy accounts he follows, and that he would immediately unfollow any that were found to be for sale. The community 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 several thousand dollars being common.

It is worth mentioning that Oracle is a typical case of buying accounts to gain traffic and ultimately running away with the money. It is reported that on October 10, 2025, the Oracle project team disappeared with the funds, and the account ceased operations. Community investigations show that Oracle likely acquired its following by "buying accounts" (originally an old account on CZ's follow list), and after the buyer took over, they renamed it, changed the avatar, issued tokens, and used the residual halo to inflate prices, only to be clarified by Four Meme that they were not partners, ultimately leading to a run.

On the surface, this is a farce of account trading, but it actually exposes deeper issues of distorted attention in the industry and extreme marketing methods by project teams. On one hand, small projects find it difficult to gain exposure through legitimate channels, directly giving rise to extreme choices by project teams, spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy an account "followed by CZ," and rebranding it to harvest traffic is far more cost-effective than spending months refining products or building communities.

On the other hand, this phenomenon also reflects the systemic distortion of attention in the industry, where the lack of effective evaluation mechanisms has turned traffic into hard currency. Retail investors tend to treat celebrity dynamics as endorsements, and project teams are no longer competing on code quality, on-chain data, or long-term planning, but rather on who can seize the spotlight faster.

The editor also pointed out in the article “What Happened to Those Who Followed CZ?” that the so-called hype is just a spark, while the community riding the concept adds fuel to the fire, and when the two meet, it ignites the market, indicating that the market itself needs hot topics to maintain attention and liquidity. Whether it is public hype or "invisible endorsements" in the follow list, under an immature evaluation mechanism, both can become short-term FOMO drivers.

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

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