Image source: Binance
On September 16, Binance exchange announced the launch of NEIRO tokens, breaking the silence of the meme market for several months. According to Binance data, as of the time of writing this article, NEIRO is quoted at $0.00086, with a 24-hour spot trading volume of $500 million and a contract trading volume of $1.9 billion. Within 24 hours, NEIRO's price rose by 150% and continued to maintain the top spot in the market.
As we all know, the origin of the ticker (token name) NEIRO comes from the original owner of DOGECOIN. On May 24 this year, the Shiba Inu Kabosu, the prototype of DOGE, passed away, which caused mourning in the crypto community. In addition to mourning, Kabosu's owner Kabosu Mama (Kabosu's mother) announced on the X platform that she adopted a new Shiba Inu member named 'ねいろ', which literally translates to 'NEIRO' in English. This news quickly triggered the emergence of multiple Meme projects with the same name in the crypto community. However, with the passage of time, many NEIRO projects on public chains have disappeared in the torrent of history. Currently, the only two case-sensitive NEIROs on the Ethereum chain have a market value of more than 50M.
(To avoid confusion, NEIRO below will refer specifically to the lowercase Neiro project, and NEIROETH will refer to the uppercase NEIRO project)
NEIRO and NEIROETH are derived from Ethereum, and it seems that they are just different in capitalization, but the two major communities are at loggerheads, complaining that the other is a fake, and there was a turmoil in the crypto community for a while.
With Binance listing NEIRO and its contracts, the dispute within the community seems to have finally been resolved.
This article will review NEIRO's development over the past month.
The beginning of the sprout
Image sourceX
On May 24 this year, DOGE prototype Shiba Inu Kabosu passed away. While the crypto industry mourned and expressed regret, it also paid a lot of attention to its owner Kabosu Mama (translated as Kabosu's mother). At 5 a.m. on July 28, Kabosu Mama posted on the X platform that she had adopted a new Shiba Inu member named 'NEIRO' (literally translated as "NEIRO" in English).
Like Kabosu, the prototype of Dogecoin Shiba Inu, Neiro also experienced many setbacks and hardships before he had a home again. Not only that, at around 8 am yesterday (3 hours after the announcement of the adoption of Neiro), Kabosu Mama (Kabosu's mother) posted another reminder: "I have seen many tokens related to Kabosu and NEIRO. To clarify this, I do not recognize any crypto projects other than @ownthedoge dog, because they own the original Doge photos and intellectual property rights (I have handed them over) and are committed to doing only good things, charity, and spreading Doge culture every day."
The NEIRO token contract of the Ethereum ecosystem was deployed at around 5:15 am on July 28. The token price rose to $0.000013 within an hour of going online, with a market value of about $5 million. It then fell to a low of $0.0000015 for two days, with a market value of less than $600,000.
Thrive
When the NEIRO token was first listed, its initial team sent 17.1 billion NEIRO tokens to Vitalik Buterin's wallet, accounting for 4% of the total supply. In the meme coin community, this promotion method is quite common. Project owners or token holders often send some tokens to well-known people in the crypto field or well-known influencers in the meme community, and then publicize the holdings of these celebrities in the community to attract more investors to buy tokens.
Image sourceX
On August 4, the NEIRO team “First NEIRO on Ethereum” posted a self-promotional post on Twitter, declaring: “We are $NEIRO for the people, on the people’s blockchain, Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin, by the way, is currently our largest shareholder. (4% of the total supply, with a market value of about $130,000 at the time of the tweet)”. If Vitalik had held on to it until now, this 4% would be worth $14 million.
Although this "porcelain marketing" tweet did not significantly increase the token price, on August 5, Vitalik Buterin suddenly sold all the meme coins he had previously received, including 17.1 billion NEIRO tokens. The tokens were sold and exchanged for 200 ETH, including 44.4 ETH from the sale of NEIRO. This behavior caused the price of NEIRO to drop sharply by 60%, and the price of NEIRO once fell to a low of $0.0000034.
Vitalik Buterin did not announce the sale on his own Twitter account, but rather in a post from NEIRO’s original official Twitter account @NEIRO_Dog (now deactivated), earning NEIRO the label of “being personally tweeted by Vitalik Buterin.”
Subsequently, NEIRO’s current CTO team @NEIROethcto added comments under Vitalik’s reply, pointing out that the NEIRO team that initially airdropped the tokens is no longer involved in the project operations, and the deployers of the tokens withdrew a few hours after the project was launched. The project has now been taken over by the community.
NEIRO’s price rose to a high of $0.00004 on August 5, but over the next week or so, its price fell by more than 93%, falling to a low of $0.0000027 on August 13.
Nirvana
Image sourceX
After the second time the market value was close to zero, the NEIRO project began to gradually show relevant materials of its ground promotion activities on social media. Many KOLs spoke out on Twitter, saying that they had not seen such a visionary team and such a united community for a long time.
Although NEIRO has not been listed on any centralized exchange CEX, it is quite popular on Twitter. Relevant information mainly focuses on showing the promotion activities of the global community and the CTO team’s donations to charities. At the same time, the news of NEIRO’s listing on the Bybit exchange also attracted widespread attention on Twitter. The dynamics on the platform are mainly updates on cooperation between NEIRO and various DeFi protocols of varying sizes. It can be said that from a certain perspective, NEIRO's community vitality and influence are very significant.
Many hands make light work. With the support of various forces, from August 13 to August 18, the value of NEIRO increased by nearly 50 times in just a few days.
Advancing at a high speed
Since reaching its price peak on August 18, the NEIRO token has been on a volatile downward trajectory. On September 6, with the launch of NEIROETH contract trading pairs on OKX and Binance, the price of NEIROETH rose sharply by 600%, while the market value of the two tokens, which were originally equivalent, stabilized at $25 million, while the other soared to $150 million. After rising by 300%, the NEIRO token quickly fell back to a low of $0.000014, a drop of nearly 90% compared to its previous high.
When the news of the launch of the contract trading pair was announced, the first reaction of many market participants was that the exchange had already made a ruling on the competition between meme tokens, and NEIROETH seemed to be the winner. Discussions in the community were full of confusion, helplessness, self-mockery, disappointment and even anger, which were not directed at the NEIRO token itself, but reflected deep concerns about the current development trend of the industry.
Just when the market generally believed that the dispute between NEIRO and NEIROETH was about to come to an end, on the afternoon of September 16, Binance announced that it would list the spot trading pair of First NEIRO on Ethereum (NEIRO), and this news once again changed the direction of the entire event. At first, people saw the capitalized NEIRO and thought of the capitalized NEIROETH that had just been launched a few days ago, so they naturally thought that this was the launch of the spot trading pair of NEIRO. When this news was announced, the price of NEIROETH also rose.
Image source: Binance
According to data from the Binance exchange, NEIROETH immediately rose by 20 points after the announcement was issued. However, when everyone realized that the token launched this time was not the uppercase NEIROETH but the lowercase NEIRO, NEIROETH fell instantly, erasing all previous gains. As of press time, it had fallen by nearly 50%.
Meanwhile, let’s see what’s happening with lowercase NEIRO?
Image source: AVE
Binance released the NEIRO spot announcement at 1:45 pm. The moment the news was announced, NEIRO rose by 200%. In the next two hours, it rose from the lowest of 0.000034 US dollars to 0.0004 US dollars, an increase of 12 times. In the following two days, it rose to a high of 0.0009 US dollars.
Calculated from the lowest price of $0.0000015 after the token was launched on July 28, the increase to today has reached 600 times!
The new king ascends the throne, the old king falls, and Binance is questioned
The current market value of NEIRO has reached 300 million US dollars, while the market value of NEIROETH is less than 80 million US dollars.
Image sourceX
As the market's violent volatility subsided, investors got a brief moment of respite. However, dissatisfaction with Binance quickly grew. Many users found Binance's behavior puzzling and felt like they were being used as an object of entertainment. Some users decided to sell their original lowercase NEIRO and invest in NEIROETH only after they were convinced that the platform would support the uppercase "NEIRO". However, the subsequent market reversal caused significant losses to these investors.
Image sourceX
Some KOLs criticized Binance's behavior. @0xSun asked whether Binance had set a precedent for listing small-cap spot and contract products. It is worth noting that before Binance announced the listing of NEIRO, the project's market value was less than 15 million US dollars, and the number of community members was only two or three thousand.
After the market trading activities came to a temporary end, community members began to pay attention to another issue: concerns about insider trading were raised. A screenshot of a WeChat group chat named "Vic TALK Consulting Service Group" was widely circulated on the Internet. In the screenshot, the group owner Vic recommended BabyDoge and mentioned Turbo, claiming that he heard about it together with UXLINK. Suspiciously, just after Binance launched the UXLINK contract on September 15, BabyDoge and Turbo also appeared in Binance's new coin listing announcement the next day.
Is this near-perfect prediction a coincidence? Market participants are generally skeptical, believing that insider trading and misconduct by Binance insiders may be involved. For a time, criticism and questioning voices arose one after another, accusing Binance of lowering the standard for listing coins, deviating from the expectations of the community, and guiding the direction of the MEME token.
In such an environment of public opinion, He Yi once again stood up to quell the controversy. In the Telegram group, He Yi clarified that Binance did not try to dominate the direction of the MEME token, and the decision to list the token was based on the lack of hot spots in the current market. She also classified the types of listed tokens, pointing out that there are currently three main types of tokens on the market: TG mini-game tokens, high-risk investment tokens for infrastructure projects, and MEME tokens. He Yi further explained the background of this incident, saying that the contract transaction followed suit and listed the capitalized NEIRO, but community feedback showed that the token had obvious insider trading problems, so Binance decided to spend time looking for token projects with lower market capitalization and dispersed holdings.
Regarding the issue of insider trading, Vic responded on X, claiming that the information came from traders who focus on the secondary market. This trader shared these views in the group because of his high winning rate, not from Binance insiders. Vic's cooperation with Binance is relatively limited, limited to a few video releases and AMA activities, far from the level of internal resource sharing. In response, the Binance Chinese community also responded that Binance attaches great importance to any behavior involving leakage or corruption. The NEIRO incident was just a mistake. Binance will also strictly investigate employee violations, and will pursue criminal liability for serious circumstances. It also calls on the market to report corruption, and the reward will be as high as 5 million US dollars.
Regulators then got involved. On September 17, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) submitted a proposed revised complaint against Binance, focusing on Binance’s token listing process, emphasizing BNB secondary sales and Binance Simple Earn, and accusing Binance of acting as an unregistered securities provider.
Related link: The US SEC proposed a stricter review of Binance's coin listing process in the proposed revised complaint
As public opinion continues to ferment, He Yiye He Yi published a long article to respond to the anxiety in the cryptocurrency circle and the rumors about listing coins: Binance needs to reconcile and does not have absolute right to speak
Related link: If we disagree, you may be right
He elaborated on the current anxiety in the cryptocurrency circle and focused on the coin listing process, saying that coin listing consists of four links: business, research group, committee, and compliance review. The core principle is to list projects with users and traffic, projects that can survive for a long time, and projects with solid business logic. Regarding the issue of insider trading, He Yi also said that the current Binance coin listing process is monitored by Monitor, and if insider trading is found, it will be reported to the U.S. Department of Justice and the inspectors stationed by Fincen, and employees involved in insider trading will be held criminally responsible.
In the current market environment, Binance has gone beyond the scope of traditional exchanges. It represents user aggregation and expectations, has become a benchmark in the industry, and has great influence, so its every move will be closely watched. This explains why when other trading platforms launched MEME or TG game tokens, the market reaction was flat, while similar moves by Binance caused widespread controversy.
At present, Binance seems to be caught in a dilemma: if it launches infrastructure tokens, it may be accused of deviating from the community's position and supporting venture capital; if it launches MEME tokens, it may be seen as lowering listing standards and manipulating the market. If it maintains the status quo, it may be criticized for lack of innovation and failure to lead the development of the industry.
Image sourceX
Since August, Binance’s currency listing strategy has undergone a significant change. This change indirectly shows that even the trading platform that occupies the leading position in the user scale is in urgent need of attracting new users to join. This phenomenon is quite similar to the trend in 2019, when the listing strategies of many exchanges gradually shifted from focusing on technology-driven cryptocurrencies to those tokens that can bring traffic, and the entire industry fell into a fierce battle for users.
Ultimately, the problem lies in the lack of liquidity. Project owners are eager to quickly obtain liquidity through listing, and Binance’s strategic adjustment is not only a positive response to market changes, but also reflects the challenges faced by the entire industry.
After the 2020 epidemic, a large amount of liquidity poured into the altcoin market, causing the market share of Altcoin to reach a record high. However, the current market share of Altcoin is difficult to predict, and what kind of market background will be needed for the next wave of large-scale liquidity injection has become a thought-provoking question.
Conclusion
From the transition from NEIROETH to NEIRO, we can see that Binance is still the most recognized asset issuance platform in the market. Whether a token can be listed on Binance has become a key factor in whether it can achieve a price surge, which is precisely the most favored marketing strategy of meme projects. Just as Dogecoin's trip to the moon brought further price increase expectations for the token, this strategy emphasizes the importance of the platform on which the token is located rather than its own value.
In the eyes of speculators, cryptocurrency itself is a huge meme, which provides ordinary people with an opportunity to dig wealth. Compared with targets with clear investment logic such as Nvidia and Pinduoduo, meme coins are still the most explosive wealth growth opportunity for ordinary people.
In addition, the liquidity problem of the crypto market needs to be solved urgently. Although gold and the S&P index of the US stock market have hit new highs, this has not brought more liquidity to the crypto market. At the recent Token2049 conference, major projects competed fiercely for limited liquidity and sought funds and buyers.
The battle for funds on the market continues, while off-market funds are waiting and looking forward to a more favorable market environment after the rate cut. The most dangerous month of September for the crypto industry is already halfway through, and October is usually a month of big market gains. Next, will the liquidity of the market improve? Tonight's Federal Reserve interest rate decision may be a key turning point.
