Trader Turns $9.6K Into $282K Tracking CZ’s Wallet

A trader turned roughly $9,600 into about $282,000 in under five hours on August 16 by watching Changpeng “CZ” Zhao’s public wallet burn a batch of MARSCOIN tokens and buying into the same coin the instant it happened.

On-chain tracker Lookonchain flagged the wallet as the single most profitable address trading MARSCOIN that day, and the trade has become a case study in how closely some traders now watch CZ’s every on-chain move.

How the Trade Actually Worked

At 08:12:55 UTC, CZ’s wallet sent 4,444 MARSCOIN to the dead address on BNB Chain, a routine burn transaction with a gas fee of a fraction of a cent. In the very next block, one second later, wallet 0x30f1…da577 bought 84.6 million MARSCOIN using 16 BNB, worth about $9,600 at the time.

To land that block, the trader paid roughly $9.90 in gas, hundreds of times the normal rate, just to get priority placement ahead of anyone else reacting to the burn. They did not wait around to see where the price went. Almost immediately, they sold half their position, 42.3 million tokens, for about 16.4 BNB, which covered their original investment and then some.

Lookonchain described it as a “2x and take out the initial investment” move, the kind of setup where the rest of the position becomes risk-free no matter what happens next.

From there, the trader sold the remaining tokens gradually, in dozens of smaller transactions rather than one dump, letting MARSCOIN keep climbing while they cashed out in pieces. By the time they were done, the wallet held 465 BNB from the sales, close to $282,000, and a balance of exactly $0 left in MARSCOIN. As Lookonchain noted, the total return was about 29 times the trader’s original stake.

A Pattern That Cuts Both Ways

Not everyone who followed the same signal made money. Another trader, wallet 0xacbf, bought 6.15 million MARSCOIN with $133,000 in USDT right after the burn, only to sell it all for about $22,400 two hours later, once CZ said he would stop using the wallet and the token dropped more than 90%.

CZ addressed the burn directly, saying he had been testing Trust Wallet and found his address cluttered with meme coins people kept sending him, so he tried burning some to clean things up, only for the blockchain’s transparency to turn a housekeeping task into a market event.

His plan now, in his own words, is that “I will stop using this address.” He has made this kind of warning before. Back in January, after traders piled into meme tokens tied to his offhand jokes, CZ said publicly that copying his casual posts as trading signals tends to end badly, a pattern MARSCOIN’s recent swings did little to disprove.