Dingaling and Binance CZ's love and hate

Written by: Cookie, Rhythm

On May 6, when CZ tweeted that the well-known NFT whale and boop.fun founder Dingaling was "a former employee fired by Binance for insider trading" and a "fake CRO", the market was confused in the shock of eating melons. Because, only about 6 hours before CZ sent this tweet, Binance Alpha had just announced the launch of boop.fun platform currency $BOOP and airdropped it to users who met the Alpha points conditions.

It seems to be over, but it also seems not to be over. After being "close to the face and opened the big" by CZ, dingaling did not respond to CZ's ruthless tweet, but he did not change his Twitter profile. This can be regarded as a "silent response."

Why did CZ do this? Why didn't Dingaling fight back head-on? Let's start by reviewing the mystery of Dingaling's identity and try to find possible answers to these questions.

Who is Dingaling?

On April 8, 2021, @OwnTheMomentNFT posted a "missing person notice" on Twitter - Who is Dingaling?

In the first week of April 2021 alone, Dingaling spent about $350,000 on NBA Top Shot NFTs. He is famous for buying and collecting a large number of rare NBA Top Shot NFTs. It can even be said that he may be the earliest famous NFT whale.

This is a Reddit post from 4 years ago, "Without whales like Dingaling, NBA Top Shot is no different from the cards our parents collected as children and have kept until now."

In the subsequent NFT bull market, this is one of the reasons why Dingaling is admired by many NFT players. He was very generous when buying NFTs. For NFTs with poor liquidity, Dingaling's purchase means that many NFT players' orders can be traded in an instant.

Soon, dingaling accepted a written interview with @OwnTheMomentNFT and revealed two pieces of personal information - I am a cryptocurrency person and an Australian.

A year and a half later, the topic of "Who is dingaling" was officially detonated by a tweet from @NFTethics. At this time, dingaling already had more than 100 BAYCs, 70 Azukis, and ranked first in the bid at the Azuki gold skateboard auction with 309 ETH.

@NFTehics concluded that dingaling is an "absolute senior executive of Binance" named Dinghua Xiao. In the early days, the Twitter account @DinghuaXiao existed, and it is still possible to search for some Binance-related tweets where Binance users interacted with the account. In these interactions, you can even see @dingalingts, the current Twitter handle of dingaling.

And if dingaling is indeed Dinghua Xiao, then he is not only a senior executive of Binance, but also a shareholder of West Realm Shires Inc, the FTX joint venture entity once co-founded by CZ and SBF.

In 2024, Dinghua Xiao, CZ and Samuel Wenjun Lim (Lin Wenjun, who was mentioned in the document as Binance's compliance director from 2018 to 2022) became defendants in related lawsuits in the FTX bankruptcy case. They were listed as defendants for allegedly participating in "fraudulent share repurchase transactions" in 2021 and creating a run effect through false statements before the collapse of FTX, and faced multiple civil compensation and restitution requirements.

Although Dinghua Xiao worked at Binance and several of Binance's subsidiaries from 2017 to September 2019 in the lawsuit, he bought shares in West Realm Shires Inc on February 28, 2020.

Only about an hour after @NFTethics' tweet, Dingaling hit back on Twitter. He said he was Australian and a former Binance employee, and accused @NFTethics of "unreasonable and speculative human flesh searches."

In fact, half a month before the launch of @NFTethics, @maid_crypto mentioned Dingaling's identity in a tweet, "Founder of Pancake and LooksRare."

Despite this, Dingaling's experience as a Binance employee has long been unknown to most people. After he changed his Twitter profile and sparked discussion, even one of the biggest NFT KOLs, @waleswoosh, said he was unaware of Dingaling's previous experience at Binance.

CZ's sudden rise and Dingaling's silence

This may be what confuses everyone - why did CZ say this about Dingaling when he had already listed on Binance Alpha and airdropped? Why didn't Dingaling fight back like he did to @NFTethics 3 years ago?

CZ's motivation for his behavior may come from two aspects. One is the possible adverse impact of Dingaling's behavior on Binance's compliance, and the other is that there may be some private affairs between him and Dingaling.

For a long time, it cannot be said that Dingaling deliberately downplayed his former Binance background, but he almost never mentioned it on his own initiative. Shortly before boop.fun went online, he changed his Twitter profile to "Building boop.fun, former founder of Binance CRO and PancakeSwap."

As an NFT whale, Dingaling does not need the background of Binance, and even this background may have a negative impact. But as the founder of boop.fun, this identity can help in marketing. You may ask, why was it not mentioned during the LooksRare period? Because LooksRare announced to the outside world that it was an anonymous team, while boop.fun was a "real-name startup."

As for the private affairs of both parties, CZ publicly stated that "Dingaling was fired because of a rat warehouse", which seems to be a reason worth getting angry about - it has caused harm to the company. But when we look through the tweets in the English circle, we will see some interesting comments. There are many stories between CZ and dingaling. I can only say that I would not be surprised if CZ said something bad about dingaling, because this is not the first time dingaling was cheated by CZ. Everyone knows what CZ did to the founders of PancakeSwap. In theory, CZ is right. Dingaling’s position is research leader (actually CRO), and he was indeed investigated for “rat trading” and fined millions of dollars. The situation of this “rat trading” is that Dingaling bought a lot of $CAKE himself, but asked CZ for a share of PancakeSwap’s revenue, which aroused the anger of CZ and Ted Lin (former Binance CGO)

Dingaling did not fight back because as a project owner, he needed Binance to make his project more successful.

In fact, he also fought back, and not changing his Twitter bio was a silent response.

The gratitude and resentment, the right and wrong, can only be fully known by the parties involved. I hope that this article's review of the "Grudges and Grudges" in the cryptocurrency circle can give you a good melon-eating experience.