The MEME Coin Craze Triggered by CZ's Dog
Incident Origin
On the morning of February 13, 2025, CZ tweeted expressing curiosity about the operational mechanism of MEME coins, asking if sharing pet names and photos would lead to the creation of related tokens, and questioning how to distinguish the official version. After understanding the relevant mechanism, he stated he needed to consider for about a day whether to respect pet privacy or disclose dog information, and also mentioned the possibility of interacting with several MEME coins on BNBChain. This triggered a frenzy online where everyone began to guess the name of CZ's pet dog and started to ambush related MEME coins in an attempt to secure early positions, with even a few tokens' market values being pushed up by thousands or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the evening of February 13, CZ announced he would release a photo of the dog in 3 hours. In the early morning of February 14, CZ revealed the photo of his pet dog Broccoli and their story, stating that he would not personally issue a Meme coin, as it depended on whether the community would do so, with details still under discussion.
Fever Development
On-chain Situation
Subsequently, BNBChain saw the emergence of tens of thousands of MEME coins named after Broccoli, with countless players rushing into this broccoli-themed PVP battle. However, BNBChain could not withstand this pressure test, resulting in network congestion and a lagging front end. BscScan has paused block data updates for about 12 hours. At the same time, as CZ did not announce the CA (contract address), a large number of tokens with the same name emerged, leaving investors bewildered, with even the official BounceBrand renaming their pre-deployed MEME coin to join this craze.
Market Anomalies
The market has seen a large number of adverse phenomena, such as rampant rug pulls, where some project teams inflated the market value of a token to 400 million USD, fabricating holder, trading volume, and all data, creating huge liquidity pools. Once retail investors went crazy chasing the price due to FOMO (fear of missing out), they began to sell off, with some tokens' market values collapsing from 400 million USD to 30 million USD in just a few minutes, while insiders walked away with over 43 million USD, ultimately leaving investors holding worthless tokens. According to on-chain data analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, there was a creator of Broccoli on BNBChain who made a profit of 6.72 million USD from just 1 BNB, creating a return of 9517 times in 24 minutes.
