Unpopular opinion post:
On Listing "Fees" (saw this a few times recently)
1. If you are a project complaining about listing airdrops or "fees" (to users),
Don't pay it.
If your project is strong, exchanges will race to list your coin.
If you have to beg an exchange to list, then... You need to ask yourself why, and who is providing value to whom.
2. If you complain about a competitor exchange's listing fees, then by all means, make your own listing fees 0, and be happy.
In fact, why not set all your fees to 0? including trading fees?
In a decentralized world, businesses are free to have their own business models. No one is forcing you to adopt a certain model.
Focus on treating your users well. Don't focus on your competitors.
3. If you are a bag holder of a coin, complain to the project. Not the exchange. Or use a DEX.
4. PancakeSwap doesn't have listing fees, and has very good volumes.
Further on this topic, exchanges adopt different listing models.
1. List everything on every blockchain. Most tokens are scams. Of the real "hard working" projects, most fail. Only a few projects will succeed.
2. Selectively list and make listing fee a revenue source. It's fine business model if you can attractive enough projects to list. Many small exchanges use this model, as they don't have enough trading fee revenue.
3. Selectively list. Ask for Airdrops to users. Security deposits, to make scams and failed projects more expensive to pull off. Protect users.
These models are not black and white, and many exchanges adopt a combination of them between spot listing, futures listing, alpha listing, web3 wallet buys, etc.
Work on your project, not other people. 🙏
binance didn't ask us for any listing fees/token supply when @virtuals_io got listed on spot.
in fact we got caught by surprised over a team dinner, when we got a message saying we had less than an hour to sort some liquidity for the initial order books lmao.
Let me share a little story on the largest ever single payment from @Binance, the $6m in 2017!
I hope this will help you better understand the #Binance culture.
Binance launched on July 14, 2017, having successfully raised $15m in its ICO two weeks prior.
Less than 6 week later, on Sept 4th, 2017, China issued a ban on crypto exchanges, crypto mining, as well as recommending any ICO projects to return users investments in full should the users want it.
With the announcement, many tokens dropped below their ICO price. BNB dropped from 22x to 6x of its ICO price. Luckily, it was still 6x. So no one wanted to return $6 for $1.
However, four other projects on Binance fell below their ICO prices. The teams behind those projects lacked the funds to fully reimburse their users.
Our team ran some calculations. The gap was about $6 million USD.
The team called me and asked if we should use our own funds to make our users whole, even though those were neither our projects, nor our obligation.
$6m million might not sound like a lot today, but to put it in perspective, we had raised $15 million just eight weeks prior. We were not profitable. We were buying servers and hiring people. We were burning cash.
Giving $6 million to users would deplete our corporate treasury by more than 40%.
I joined the call on a moving train in Tokyo. I asked if anyone had any objections.
No one objected. I said, “let’s do it”.
Percentage wise, that was the single largest transaction in our corporate history.
That announcement immediately received overwhelming responses from the crypto community, not only in China, but around the world.
No other company had protected its users to such an extent, even to this day.
The market rewarded us. Users from around the world joined us. They saw that Binance protected users with not just words, but with action and funds.
When we made the decision to make users whole, we had about 35,000 users. A month later, we had 120,000 users. We became profitable, and have been ever since.
Two months after that, we became the world’s largest crypto exchange, and have been ever since.
Hence our core value: Protect Users!