In the hidden corners of the industry, how many unknown transactions exist.

Written by: shaofaye123, Foresight News

Since Moonrock Capital CEO Simon complained about exorbitant listing fees, the controversy surrounding listing fees has intensified. Major KOLs have sparked a heated discussion — do exorbitant listing fees really exist? What exactly are hidden listing fees? How do exchanges profit? In the hidden corners of the industry, how many unknown transactions are there? Let’s take a look one by one.

Controversy over exorbitant listing fees

Since the outbreak of the exorbitant listing fee incident, it has attracted significant attention. Many well-known figures in the industry have responded. In addition to Sonic Labs co-founder Andre Cronje quickly refuting Coinbase, TRON founder Justin Sun also voiced support, saying, "Binance did not charge us any fees for listing. Coinbase once demanded we pay 500 million TRX (about 80 million USD) and required us to deposit 250 million USD in BTC with Coinbase Custody to enhance its performance."

Conflux COO Zhang Yuanjie also stepped in to support, "Binance charges a zero listing fee for CFX. Due to poor token performance, a deposit of 150k BUSD was confiscated. Since there were no security vulnerabilities in the Conflux network, the margin of 5 million CFX tokens was eventually returned. When will CFX be listed on Coinbase for free? I can defend you."

Binance also quickly responded positively; besides He Yi speaking out on Twitter, Zhao Changpeng, who was recently released from prison, also stated, "Bitcoin has never paid any listing fees. Focus on projects, not exchanges."

Event review recommended reading: Amidst rampant rumors, how much of Binance's exorbitant listing fees are true or false?

What are the hidden listing fees?

In September this year, He Yi responded to the market's concern about listing issues. Binance has a basic framework and strict process for listing, consisting of four stages: business, research group, committee, and compliance review, which will not raise suspicions of information leakage or insider trading.

Based on the disclosed information, there is no direct portion of token shares or stablecoins given as "bribes" in the fees required for listing on Binance. However, project parties need to allocate a certain distribution share (around 5%) to Binance Launchpool and not reserve airdrop rewards for specific users. Besides these known fees, from the CFX listing situation, project parties must also pay a substantial margin to ensure price stability, otherwise, it will be confiscated. Additionally, investment shares and activity funds also need to be agreed upon by project parties and Binance.

In response to the aforementioned "hidden listing fees," some believe that margins, airdrops, etc. are just different terms for exorbitant listing fees, like the tip of an iceberg hidden beneath the surface. Others argue that this is not unreasonable, as these cannot be conflated with hidden listing fees because airdrop shares are rewards for users.

Concerns about centralized exchanges

Hidden corners of the industry are not uncommon, and with exchanges generating substantial revenue, it is difficult to guarantee the absence of opaque transactions.

Currently, apart from trading fees and capital utilization returns, small assets left untradeable in user accounts and paper trading arbitrage may also become part of exchange revenue. Compared to these, many non-compliant exchanges also exploit benefits through malicious behaviors such as price manipulation, data dumping, and news dumping.

Under the traditional centralized exchange model, similar to the GME incident, trading platform Robinhood restricted buying and selling, making stock price manipulation unavoidable. The interest exchange between project parties, market makers, and exchanges is also opaque to retail investors. Users seem unable to be in a fair position under the centralized exchange model.

The listing return rate is negative

Listing is aimed at profit, and whether retail investors, exchanges, or project parties all hope to profit. However, based solely on the current listing return rates, discussions about hidden listing fees seem to be misplaced; price recovery and project development may be more worthy of industry attention.

From the beginning of the year to now, the average return rate of most exchanges has been negative, with Bybit's average return rate dropping the most, reaching -50.20%. KuCoin's average return rate is -48.30%, and Bitget's average return rate is -46.50%. Binance and OKX's average return rates are also negative, at -27.00% and -27.30% respectively. If the hidden corners are not cleaned up, the industry's development may be hindered.

Facing the predicament of centralized exchanges, Simon, who exposed the exorbitant listing fees, shared his views. "It is important to clarify that the issue is not whether Coinbase, Binance, or any other bad CEX is better. The real question is: which DEX should you use?"