On May 6, when CZ tweeted that Dingaling, the well-known NFT whale and founder of boop.fun, was a "former employee fired by Binance for insider trading" and a "fake CRO", the market was confused in the shock of the melon-eating. Because, only about 6 hours before CZ sent this tweet, Binance Alpha just announced the launch of boop.fun platform currency $BOOP and airdropped it to users who met the Alpha points conditions.
Things seem to be over, but they also seem not to be over. After being "close to the face and open the ultimate" by CZ, dingaling did not respond to CZ's ruthless tweet, but he did not change his Twitter profile either. This can be regarded as a "silent response."
Why did CZ do this? Why didn't Dingaling fight back directly? 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?
Dingaling spent about $350,000 on NBA Top Shot NFTs in the first week of April 2021 alone. He is famous for purchasing 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 than the cards our parents collected as children and have kept to this day."
This is also one of the reasons why Dingaling was highly praised by many NFT players in the subsequent NFT bull market. He was very generous when buying NFTs. For NFTs with poor liquidity, Dingaling's purchases meant that many NFT players' orders were fulfilled 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 ignited by a tweet from @NFTethics. At this time, Dingaling already owned more than 100 BAYCs, 70 Azukis, and ranked first in the Azuki Gold Skateboard auction with 309 ETH.
@NFTehics concluded that dingaling is an "absolute senior Binance employee" 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 Binance executive, but also a shareholder of West Realm Shires Inc, the FTX joint venture entity once jointly established 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 the FTX bankruptcy lawsuit. They were named 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 requests.
Although the lawsuit documents stated that Dinghua Xiao worked at Binance and its subsidiaries from 2017 to September 2019, the time of purchasing shares of West Realm Shires Inc was February 28, 2020.
Just about an hour after @NFTethics’ tweet, Dingaling responded on Twitter, saying he was Australian and a former Binance employee, and accused @NFTethics of “unfounded 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 is CZ still talking about dingaling when it has already been listed on Binance Alpha and airdropped? Why doesn't Dingaling fight back like it 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. 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 require the background of Binance, and this background may even 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 public at the time 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 for insider trading", which seems to be a reason to be angry - it caused harm to the company. But when we look through the tweets in the English circle, we can 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 that dingaling has been cheated by CZ. Do you know what CZ did to the founders of PancakeSwap?
In theory, CZ is right. Dingaling’s position is research leader (de facto CRO), and he was indeed investigated for “insider trading” and fined millions of dollars. The situation of this “insider 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 the project owner, he needed Binance to make his project more successful.
In fact, he also fought back, but not changing his Twitter bio was a silent response.
Only the parties involved can fully understand the love and hate, right and wrong. I hope that this article's review of the "love and hate" in the cryptocurrency circle can give you a good experience of watching the melons.
