Quick take:
Dingaling (pseudonym) has become the latest NFT whale to be unmasked by crypto investigative researcher NFT Ethics on Twitter. NFT Ethics claims to have unmasked the deep links between dingaling’s NFTs and DeFi transactions with a major cryptocurrency exchange.
Dingaling is considered one of the most successful NFT investors, simply judging by his NFT portfolio, which holds more than 100 BAYC, over 70 Azuki, and received over 8 figures in airdrops, including 1434898 ApeCoin tokens.
According to a tweet published by Dingaling on March 17, 2022, the NFT whale appears to own 113 Bored Apes, 98 Mutant Apes and 110 Kennel Club NFTs, accompanied by 1,434,898 claimable Ape tokens, which at the time were worth more than $10 million.
The wallet also shows that Dingaling was among the earliest investors in NFTs, after investing in CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot.
According to NFT Ethics, the NFT whale also put the highest bid of 309 ETH for the recently concluded Azuki golden skateboard gamified NFT sale.
The investigative researcher claims to have found it far easier than expected to unmask the face behind Dingaling’s NFT account.
“It was pathetically easy to find his identity, as his former Twitter handle corresponds exactly to his full name and it turns out that Dingaling is working at the absolute top level of Binance next to CZ (we mean: just under CZ of course :)).”
So, Dingaling’s true identity was revealed to be Dinghua Xiao, who has been working under Chengpeng (CZ) Zhao at binance from the very beginning.
Further research found that although a lot of his association with Binance seems to have been erased, he still serves as director of the crypto exchange company’s Bermuda-based offshore entity and was also part of a joint venture formed by FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and CZ-Binance.
In one of the rare interviews done by Dingaling, he revealed that he was a basketball fan, which NFT Ethics managed to match his biological profile.
The NFT whale is also one of the most vocal supporters of wash trading, at one time calling it ‘genius’. He currently serves as an advisor to the highly incentivised NFT marketplace, LookRare.
After digging deeper, NFT Ethics also found that “looking at LooksRare’s private sale, besides some well-known “influencer investors”, there were also a lot of newly created anon wallets that put in the max value of 37.5 ETH, all sourced from Binance and only for this purpose.”
Furthermore, the data also showed that Dingaling was the first investor in the LooksRare NFT platform, which according to the investigative researcher may imply that LooksRare may be largely funded by Binance.
NFT Ethics goes further to suggest that Dingaling may actually be one of the pseudonymous founders of LookRare, who goes by the name Zodd (ZoddLooksRare), pointing to tweet activity that includes responding to questions regarding the huge $30 million $LOOKS tokens cashed out by founders through crypto mixing platform Tornado Cash.
And then comes the big one. Guts (no Twitter account) the other pseudonym used by the second LooksRare co-founder, could actually be CZ.“The fact that LooksRare is (in)famous for the insane amount of wash trading resulting in $LOOKS rewards, and its close ties to Binance could put things also in a different light including the main NFT collections Dingaling trades in,” writes NFT Ethics.
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