I am not afraid of offending people—'The Binance Coin Listing Dilemma' is an inevitable outcome, and the redemption plan is very cruel.
1. Traditional Listing vs Crypto Listing
The two most important purposes of traditional company listings:
1. Refinance and expand production;
2. Endorsement;
Both are to give businesses a competitive advantage, thereby creating more profits for themselves & shareholders.
Secondly, it also has:
3. Founders and investors exit;
4. Incentivize employees;
The former is a true benefit and encourages more businesses to be born in society; the latter gains a competitive advantage by increasing employee loyalty.
Importance 1>2>3>4
This is why people used to say 'capital will self-replicate', because all goals end in: making more money through business advantages.
Moreover, many companies do not even want to go public, such as ByteDance and Huawei, because they already make enough money on their own and no longer need to expand their business advantages through refinancing.
The cruel truth of our industry is well known; 99% of Crypto projects do not make money at all.
The purpose of expanding business advantages has never existed from the very beginning. Investing in reproduction is meaningless; the more you invest, the greater the loss.
So only purposes 3 and 4 remain, namely the exit of founders, investors, and employees.
2. Benefits and Obligations
Traditional listings have strict requirements and obligations:
Before going public: There must be a capable sponsoring institution for the IPO; this step must at least prove that the founder and business model are generally sound, making the founder aware that this opportunity is precious and should not be messed up; the sponsoring institution also cherishes its reputation (license) and will not use excessive under-the-table tactics.
However, the problem with Crypto protocols is that they enjoy the benefits of traditional listings: investors exit/incentivize employees...
However, it has not assumed any obligations of traditional listings:
Before listing, the project side has no sponsoring institutions; many founders do not realize that listing is a rigorous matter. On the contrary, everyone is an anonymous project and does not consider future reproduction.
So—bribery/fraud/botting/scamming, all means, of course, should be 'exhausted', because there will be no punishment!
3. Will not be punished
Important things must be said three times:
Will not be punished;
Will not be punished;
Will not be punished;
The project side will not be punished, the exchange employees will not be punished, and the exchange itself will not be punished.
3.1 Project Side
The project side's heaviest punishment is being blacklisted by the exchange.
But what does blacklisting count for?
Using a classic hypothetical question, suppose you have a red button in front of you:
A. 50% chance to obtain 10 million;
B. 50% chance of not being able to press this button again;
You press it? You better press it 100 times right now—does this count as a punishment?
3.2 Exchange Employees
You could say that Binance and Coinbase have punishments for bribed employees—criticism, dismissal, and even theoretically pursuing legal responsibility.
However, collecting evidence is too difficult. Crypto is the hardest asset to trace in the world, even Russia, Iran, and North Korea are using it. You have to know that our industry has the world's number one infrastructure in terms of privacy:
I use Signal or TG for private chats;
I trade using some cross-chain bridges, and even mixers;
I withdraw funds using some third-tier exchanges that do not require KYC.
Even if Interpol personally investigates, it may not be solvable. How can your mere internal audit department of an exchange dare to claim to solve corruption?
And corruption is also extremely covert:
Just say a few nice words inside the exchange and give a few pointers at the project meeting.
In fact, as long as you choose to remain silent when the leader is in an information bubble—rather than breaking it—you have completed the entire bribery process.
So, as Jocy said, the project side specifically bribes the KOLs that the exchange owners pay attention to. Your exchange's internal secret agents, even if Chen Lifeng were to come back to life, cannot solve this; it's an unsolvable conspiracy.
3.3 The Exchange Itself
We imagine the exchange as a physical entity.
Launching a coin that first drops 90%, then drops another 90% a year later, compared to launching a tenfold coin, is merely the former making less money and the latter making more.
Yes, you found out, garbage coins on exchanges, even still make money, will not lose money.
And the punishment based on reputation cannot be quantified at all; the exchange will not set up a department specifically to track reputation changes; offending leaders and colleagues, with no financial gain, no one will do it.
So, what kind of punishment is this? Listing a garbage coin, and the punishment is 'earning a little less money'?
Does this count as punishment?
4. Financial Disclosure
Traditional companies disclose financial statements regularly after going public, and there are countless short-seller institutions and retail investors looking through the financial reports.
Take an example we all know, due to PwC taking on the Evergrande case, it has been criticized to the point of being unable to take care of itself, and more critically, PwC received a huge fine of 320 million yuan from regulators.
However, after a Crypto project is listed, not to mention the lack of financial disclosure, it is very difficult to clarify the whereabouts of the funds in the on-chain treasury.
The project side can freely allocate the money obtained from reducing holdings; it can buy luxury houses, host yacht parties, date, or even research immortality, the only certainty is that it will not reinvest to expand production.
This is the key issue—after Listing, reducing holdings/cashing out itself is not a problem, but the issue is that after cashing out, there is no reinvestment in production, which leads to a loss cycle.
5. Solutions
To address the symptoms, the depth of the disease, only: stop listing coins, stop listing coins, stop listing coins.
Before the Crypto project fundamentally solves the 'there is no income at all' issue, listing coins has no meaning:
Launching a coin that directly drops 90% is just quickly cutting off all users;
Pulling up ten times first, then trapping at the top, is helping smart users cut off foolish users.
It's just fifty steps laughing at a hundred steps; the latter's face looks better, considered to be cutting based on ability, the so-called 'given opportunities'.
Warning: If exchanges continue to adopt the existing coin listing strategy, gradually being eroded or even replaced by DEX is just a matter of time.
Even one day, if the Telegram Bot captures 5-10% of the shares of BN, CB, and UB, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
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Now let's enter fantasy time: the fundamental solution: set up two sites, main site + community site.
[Main Site] Gradually Contract
Immediately stop listing coins, and if you are more radical, gradually eliminate and delist the previous tokens.
[Community Site] Newly Established
The newly established community site adopts a DEX model, namely a registration system, where every project can fairly list coins.
I ask, when has Uniswap or Raydium ever been criticized for launching tens of thousands of tokens daily?
When has Hayden Adams ever been bribed? That Alpha Ray doesn't even have a real name, and no one needs to create an information bubble for him.
There may be growing pains, but the benefit is:
In the future, going on Binance or Coinbase will no longer be the exit point for project parties; rather, it will be the starting point for striving to create amazing applications (otherwise, they won't make money).
Value discovery is completely entrusted to the community, rather than to the coin listing team or investment department. The registration system can perfectly solve the question of 'why BN is always the last one to act.'
If there are tomorrow's Crypto stars inside, it certainly won't miss out.
And the garbage coins inside will never deceive more people through unfair means.
Look forward to this day; this decision is great and cruel.
However, once successful, it can even reverse the trend of the entire industry, stop the craze for To Binance and To Coinbase, and give birth to a truly killer app like ChatGPT.
Never violate human nature;
Never violate business rules.