CoinUp Distances Itself From Zhu Pan After CPX Token Crash

Published by James Harris on June 23, 2026June 23, 2026

Singapore-registered exchange CoinUp is in active damage control after its native token CPX crashed, with the platform blaming “concentrated selling pressure” while publicly distancing itself from Zhu Pan, a figure accused of running a fraudulent token project in China in 2018 that allegedly raised hundreds of millions of yuan before collapsing to zero.

The timing and the cast of characters make this harder to dismiss than a routine token sell-off. Binance co-founder He Yi posted publicly that Zhu Pan had previously attempted to impersonate her to run a scam and had separately impersonated Tron founder Justin Sun using AI-generated content. She also warned of a WeChat account currently impersonating Binance’s CZ. CoinUp’s own response acknowledged Zhu Pan as a project owner on its platform while insisting he has no role in core management, a distinction that does little to address why someone with his alleged history was associated with the exchange at all. The pattern being described, dividend schemes, lockup mechanisms, a token that craters, echoes the playbook that burned retail participants repeatedly during the 2017-2018 ICO era in China, and regulators in that region have long institutional memory for it.

CoinUp has not disclosed the scale of the CPX price decline, the volume of tokens sold, or who sold them.

That omission is the story. The exchange cited a completed security review finding no breach or hack, which effectively narrows the explanation to insider selling, a large coordinated holder exit, or deliberate manipulation, none of which it has ruled out. CoinUp reported $3 billion in average daily trading volume and a $3 billion reserve fund in March, figures that now face obvious scrutiny given the platform cannot or will not explain what moved its own token. For retail users still on the platform, the assurance that deposits and withdrawals remain operational is the floor, not the ceiling, of what they should want answered.

The broader issue is what this signals about exchange-native tokens as a category. Projects that combine platform tokens with lockup mechanisms and yield-style incentives have a structural vulnerability: when confidence breaks, exit pressure concentrates instantly, and the exchange is simultaneously the issuer, the market maker, and the party responsible for explaining the collapse. CoinUp’s promise to publish investigation results “at the earliest opportunity” is the kind of language that tends to precede either a very long wait or a very short explanation.