BNB Chain (BNB) said it is pursuing legal action against a former employee who allegedly used a wallet created for a company tutorial to launch and profit from a new memecoin called Asteroid Shiba (ASTEROID).

In a 6:10 a.m. ET post on X Saturday, BNB Chain said the employee "retained unauthorised access" to the seed phrase for a wallet created for a video tutorial. BNB Chain said the individual "is no longer with the company as part of this incident," and the Binance-associated blockchain firm is now "pursuing legal action against the former employee and cooperating with relevant authorities on this matter." 

Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao reposted BNB Chain's statement, calling the former employee "basically a scammer" and telling users to "Stay SAFU."

The wallet in question was originally used to launch TST, a test token that was featured in a BNB Chain video tutorial in February 2025. TST subsequently attracted speculative trading after the tutorial briefly exposed the token's name and Zhao posted about it, sending its market capitalization above $50 million despite several official statements that neither Binance nor BNB Chain had endorsed it.

Following the growth of the memecoin, the BNB Chain team deleted the video and the private key for the creator address, which held 0.13% of TST's supply, according to Zhao. Yet the individual allegedly retained the wallet's seed phrase, allowing them to regain control of the creator address and use it to launch ASTEROID.

The token launched from the tutorial wallet appears to have imitated an existing project also called Asteroid Shiba. The team behind the pre-existing project said in a post on X that the new token was a copycat launched through Flap using the same rewards model. It said it had no affiliation with the token launched from the former employee's wallet.

Onchain analytics firm Lookonchain said on X the former employee deployed ASTEROID and used four newly created wallets to purchase 796.7 million tokens, representing 79.67% of the total supply, for approximately $10,000. The four purchasing wallets were separate from the former BNB Chain employee's tutorial wallet, which was used to initiate ASTEROID's launch.

The wallets later reportedly sold 718.8 million ASTEROID tokens for 1,103 BNB, worth about $638,000 at the time, generating an estimated profit of $628,000, according to Lookonchain. The Block could not independently verify Lookonchain's assertion that the wallets belonged to the former employee. 

BNB Chain did not describe what exact legal action the firm is pursuing against the former employee and in which jurisdiction. BNB Chain did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block.