Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao has issued a strong call for a coordinated, industry-wide response to eliminate address poisoning scams, following a recent incident where a victim lost $50 million within one hour. Zhao emphasized that such attacks can be completely eradicated through the adoption of real-time blacklist queries and standardized warnings across all crypto wallets.
Address poisoning attacks occur when a malicious actor plants a similar-looking address in a victim's transaction history. When the victim copies this address—often because the starting and ending characters appear identical—the funds are sent to the scammer's wallet instead of the intended recipient. This exploits the difficulty of manually verifying long cryptocurrency addresses.
Zhao stated that Binance already alerts users when they attempt to make transactions to potentially malicious addresses, but he argued that an industry-wide consensus across blockchain networks would make warning systems more effective. "We can completely eradicate this type of poison address attacks," Zhao declared in a December 24, 2025 post.
The proposed solution involves security alliances maintaining shared blacklists of known malicious addresses, which wallets could query in real-time to prevent transactions to scam addresses. Zhao stressed that while technical tools are essential, user education remains critical, particularly as artificial intelligence advances make scams more sophisticated and difficult to detect.
Some community members have suggested alternative approaches, including using Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains for large transactions to avoid dealing with long strings of characters, or improving wallet design to automatically verify address legitimacy. The initiative comes as self-custody wallet adoption grows, making user protection increasingly important for the broader crypto ecosystem.
