CZ takes crypto’s crown again, with BNB and ASTER as his new power plays

Call him the crypto puppet master or just plain unstoppable, CZ has climbed back to the top as the planet’s biggest crypto influencer, and his Midas touch is golden in the forms of BNB and ASTER.

Fellow crypto expert David Canellis published an excellent piece on Blockworks, and guys, it is indeed a good read!

Perpetual DEX

BNB is flirting with a $150 billion market cap. Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, BNB has been sprinting where others barely jog, carrying the momentum like an over-caffeinated marathoner.

Sure, some well-timed news flashes about BNB treasury companies helped, but let’s not kid ourselves. Canellis says the combined treasure trove is strong yet tiny, making its influence on such a monumental rally questionable.

But as Canellis highlighted, here is the key momentum, because enter ASTER, the shiny new star of the show.

This token, part of a fresh perpetual DEX built on BNB Chain and backed by CZ’s $10 billion YZi Labs family office, shot up to a market cap of nearly $3.9 billion.

It provides 1001x leverage, turning heads as the top perpetual DEX by volume this past week, trading more than $100 billion, with its nearest competitor, Hyperliquid, trailing behind at $64.6 billion.

Supply concentration?

ASTER’s secret sauce? A massive points campaign promising to airdrop 50% of its total token supply.

Traders rack up points by trading, holding positions, referring friends, and even on profits or losses.

This game is about collecting points until Q4 2025’s token giveaway drops. You can imagine the frenzy.

ASTER was born from the 2025 merger of Astherus and APX Finance. The APX token rebranded to ASTER and was redeemable 1:1 for holders last week.

Yet, whispers of supply concentration and influencer whales, like CZ himself cheering MrBeast’s ASTER trades, raise eyebrows about how much power these players really wield over the price.

Two whales recently accumulated 118.25M $ASTER ($270.8M), 7.13% of the circulating supply.

15 wallets (likely the same whale) withdrew 68.25M $ASTER ($156.3M) from #Aster 4 days ago.

Wallet 0xFB3B, which has ties to Daniel Larimer( @bytemaster7 ) and Galaxy Digital, withdrew 50M… pic.twitter.com/jPXoPhlgTf

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) September 25, 2025

They call him key opinion leader

Also, don’t forget that CZ’s influence extends beyond just his familiar BNB stomping ground.

Up until February, he hadn’t traded on any decentralized exchange or dabbled with liquidity pools.

Now? His family office, YZi Labs, fuels aggressive funding rounds aimed at expanding BNB treasury strategies, including a $1 billion push for a second BNB DAT known as B Strategy.

It all paints a vivid picture. CZ is reshaping the crypto cosmos not just with his teams and products but as a market-moving „Key Opinion Leader”, as experts call him.

When he wasn’t around, like during his brief prison stay over Binance’s sketchy KYC/AML, BNB’s price dipped. Post-release? The jump was spectacular.