Just entering the second month of 2025, Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency trading platform, was embroiled in multiple controversies over the issue of "currency listing".
In response to questions raised by the public about "employee bribery", "girlfriend coins" and the strictness of coin listing review, Binance co-founder He Yi responded separately and then added a 6-hour AMA. The response was the most detailed ever, including that Binance's internal investigation department "handled more than 120 investigation cases in the past two years, of which 60 employees were fired for violations"; she reiterated that the investment department "Yzi Labs" (formerly Binance Labs) is independent of the trading platform; she also reflected on whether the timeliness and innovation of the Binance Listing (coin listing) department driven by the "strict selection mechanism" are really effective.
In fact, due to the lack of supervision, there has always been controversy over the cryptocurrency trading platform being "both a player and a referee" in the link of "listing new assets". Coupled with the intensified competition, the freshness of listed assets is often linked to market attention. Falling behind the popularity also means missing out on traffic.
Since Binance accepted the requirement for comprehensive monitoring by law enforcement monitors after reaching a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice at the end of 2023, the coin listing dilemma of this "world's largest trading platform" is more focused on the latter — — how to balance the interests of listed projects and users.
A realistic challenge facing it is that when off-site traffic hypes up a certain asset and capital supports a star project, how can Binance protect local users from being harvested after they go online?
This is a huge challenge for any trading platform. In this regard, He Yi promised that after the asset is launched, Binance, as a platform, will never intervene in the price, and the market will still be the determining factor of the price; as for the online review, she gave the solution: further transparency.
Only 26% of Yzi Labs’ investment projects will be listed on Binance in 2024
At the beginning of February, amid the overall decline in the cryptocurrency market, Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency trading platform, became the first target of public opinion attacks.
First, a netizen who claimed to be a project entrepreneur posted an anonymous article accusing Binance Labs personnel and the Binance listing team of "backroom operations, profit transfer and extortion" in multiple projects; then, after the official deleted the creator's private key of the test token used by BNBChain's Meme coin publishing tool to demonstrate usage, it was still hyped up by the market, and then "went straight to Binance at the speed of light" and then fell, causing users to question Binance's new listing policy.
After the accusatory article spread online, He Yi issued a statement to clarify that Binance Labs and Binance are "completely independent" and "make their own decisions." The co-founder of Binance said that Binance Labs, which has now been renamed Yzi Labs, "currently has invested in thousands of projects, and only a very small percentage of the invested projects are listed on Binance."
This proportion can be seen more specifically through the data of 2024. Honeycomb Tech found that among the 38 projects publicly announced by Yzi Labs, 10 were eventually launched on Binance, accounting for 26%. Among them, 3 were the first to land on Binance Launchpool and issued new coin airdrops to BNB and FUSD staking users.
Last year, only 10 of Binance Labs’ publicly disclosed investment projects were listed on Binance
He Yi's clarification did not seem to dispel the fog. On February 10, He Yi, together with some of the named employees and project representatives, invited the media and users to respond. This AMA, which lasted more than 6 hours, disclosed key information about Binance's internal governance, handling of employee violations, and coin listing management, and some details were known to the outside world for the first time.
For example, has Binance received any complaints through its public reporting channel for employee violations? Have they been handled? If they have been handled, why haven’t they been made public?
He Yi gave a set of data: In the past two years, Binance's internal investigation department has handled more than 120 cases for violations such as bribery, information leakage, etc., of which 60 employees were dismissed for violations and more than 30 million US dollars of illegal gains were recovered.
Regarding the types of violations, He Yi said that most of them were not structural problems such as "rat trading", and no insider trading or other interest issues were found, but violations such as accepting bribes or changing the company's coin receiving address to one's own address were investigated. "We filed a lawsuit and called the police," but because these cases involve privacy, have not yet been closed, or are still under investigation and must be submitted to US law enforcement and monitoring agencies, the specific details cannot be disclosed until the legal procedures are completed.
“But I want to emphasize that Binance has always been serious about anti-corruption,” He Yi promised, adding that she would identify the parties involved in corruption in the future, “or at least let them come forward to explain to everyone, including the project parties that cooperate with us.”
In fact, compared with other cryptocurrency trading platforms, Binance's internal review and management are objectively stricter, because in the settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice at the end of 2023, Binance agreed to have a third-party monitor conduct internal supervision for 3-5 years and report possible misconduct directly to law enforcement agencies in some cases.
This oversight covers policies, procedures and internal controls, customer and third-party relationships, enforcement and discipline, as well as monitoring, testing and auditing, and targets the company's "former employees, agents, intermediaries, consultants, representatives, distributors, licensees, contractors, suppliers and joint venture partners."
With the long-term attention of law enforcement agencies, Binance's anti-corruption efforts will surely not be compromised, and the pain point for users regarding listing coins on Binance is actually the price.
He Yi reflects on the timeliness of "strictly selecting coins to list"
One question is, even if the projects invested by Yzi Labs eventually lead to the Binance trading market, can users use this as a basis for secondary market operations? Judging from historical results, such an idea is not wise.
As of February 7, all 10 Yzi Lans investment targets listed on Binance have fallen from their closing prices on the first day, ranging from 7.14% to 94.76%. Unless users can get low-priced chips before these assets go online or buy at a low point and sell at a high point on the first day of listing, the new assets in this round of cycles are likely to weaken for a long time in the atmosphere of "Bitcoin is the only dominant player and the altcoin season has never come."
Throughout 2024, the number of newly listed assets on the top crypto asset exchanges in terms of spot trading volume exceeded 500 after deduplication. Statistics show that the number of new assets listed on Binance, Coinbase, and OKX was less than 100, while KuCoin reached 298, Bitget reached 369, and Gate.io launched 659 new coins. If we look back at the ROI (return on investment) of the project, it is not difficult to find that the recent performance of each new asset is not good.
ROI data of listed assets on 7 major platforms in 2024 (statistics as of February 5, 2025)
As of February 5 this year, if the median ROI of new coins on each platform is calculated based on ATH (All-Time High), the assets listed on each platform last year have achieved a positive rate of return. Binance's new coins have the best median ATH ROI performance, reaching 126.64%. Coinbase has the fewest newly listed assets and the lowest median ATH ROI.
However, if we look at the recent market prices, as of February 5, the ROI performance of "new assets" listed on the secondary markets last year was negative. In the market environment where all the players were wiped out, Binance and OKX, which did not pursue quantity, performed better, at -52.49% and -50.25% respectively.
Binance has the fewest new assets and a relatively good ROI performance, but it has also encountered more sharp criticism because of the largest number of users and the largest scale. This year, users collectively lamented, "New coins fall as soon as they are listed. Has Binance's wealth effect weakened?" The focus of the contradiction points to the coin listing review.
In the AMA on February 10, He Yi also disclosed in more detail the three new audit benchmarks on Binance. Under the platform compliance requirement of "not being able to directly affect prices", the Listing team mainly considers the following standards based on data investigation and analysis:
Asset quality benchmark: quarterly review of ROI and other trading platforms (follow-up review)
The breakthrough of the project in the industry: Can the asset bring in new users (analysis expectations)
Project popularity (technology, valuation, topicality): whether the asset can bring a high transaction volume share (competitive demand)
Although these three standards allow Binance to basically cover all types of projects, He Yi also found a problem: In a free market like crypto assets, is Binance's "strict selection mechanism" a bit outdated? "Because we need to do security investigations or data investigations, but in this process, the processing speed is often delayed, which leads to the price going up when Binance goes online."
When criticism hit Binance for its coin listing review, it ultimately points to the wealth effect. He Yi admitted that Binance has made some new attempts for this, such as MegaDrop and pre-market, but the effect is not ideal.
We still remember the strong new effect created by Binance Launchpad during the IEO era. It can be said that "whatever is listed will rise", which once caused other trading platforms to rush to get it. In He Yi's opinion, this is because the new assets launched on this product have pricing. "When the project is sold on Launchpad, there is a price when users subscribe, while the tokens of LaunchPool activities are directly distributed to users, and the price is determined by the market, and Binance cannot intervene."
As the regulatory environment and market competition change, Binance has been constantly adjusting its coin listing policy based on user suggestions. “We have certainly heard the criticism and will seriously consider how to improve it. But we also need to think about whether these adjustments and innovations are really effective and whether they can keep up with the development of the times.”
How to find a balance between chasing hot spots and protecting users?
As of February 13, Coingecko has included 1,242 centralized and decentralized (on-chain) trading platforms and 17,137 types of crypto assets (Coins). This is not all that have appeared on this free market — — According to Coingecko’s report in April 2024, the number of crypto assets has reached 2.52 million, a 5.7-fold increase from 440,000 at the end of 2021.
There are many trading venues and even more crypto assets. All trading platforms are scrambling to list new coins in order to bet on hot spots and grab traffic. Even Memecoin, which is worthless and only has the meaning of a meme, will lose market share once it becomes popular.
The Shiba Inu (SHIB) and other "dog series" Memecoins in 2020 have taught Binance a lesson. After that, Binance still prudently chose to chase hot spots. Even if SATS, which suddenly emerged in the Bitcoin BRC-20 ecosystem in March and May 2023, became popular, it was not launched until the end of the year, and was once complained by users for "missing the opportunity".
The "strict selection" strategy of not chasing hot spots is a bit thankless for Binance.
CoinGecko (2024 Crypto Industry Annual Report) shows that the spot trading volume of centralized exchanges in the fourth quarter reached 6.45 trillion US dollars, a month-on-month increase of 111.7%, setting a new high. Binance still dominates, but its market share has dropped from 50.71% in March to 34.7% in December. However, its trading volume climbed to the 1 trillion US dollar mark in December, which is the second time it has broken this record in 2024.
Market share of spot trading volume of mainstream crypto asset trading platforms in 2024
All practitioners in the exchange industry should be able to feel that competition is becoming more brutal. The Binance management team is also well aware that users will eventually abandon them if they fail to keep up with the changes. As He Yi said, "Users will still vote with their actions."
Competition and users are actually two sides of the same coin.
Binance, which has suffered losses, has recently taken a radical approach. The test token TST created by the BNB Chain Memecoin release tool when demonstrating its functions was still hyped up as a popular Memecoin after the official deleted the creator’s private key to warn against speculation and CZ repeatedly clarified that it had nothing to do with the team. Finally, Binance issued a listing announcement and entered the market 4 hours later. It was criticized again for its sharp drop. This is probably the result of Binance being driven by the "project popularity KPI".
Although Binance’s founder CZ agreed with the fact that “exchanges must compete to list popular tokens (with trading volume) as early as possible”, he also questioned the rationality of Binance’s advance notification process.
It seems that Binance still has a lot to iterate on in the coin listing process. However, He Yi made clear the purpose of the improvement: more transparency. She proposed two feasible adjustment directions based on user suggestions:
Binance returns all listing fees to users and the community, and publicly indicates the distribution and destination. The current mature model is through LaunchPool.
The design rules require the project party to disclose more information, and everyone can understand the true situation of the project through channels such as AMA.
A substantial step towards greater transparency has been taken. On February 14, Binance added new currency information disclosure content, that is, in addition to the original profile information of all listed assets, new "token unlocking" information was added, including allocation, unlocking progress, unlocking schedule, unlocking events, etc.; allocation, unlocking progress and other information will be displayed in a more intuitive way, so that users can make more informed trading decisions; in addition, "unlocked tokens" will also be included in the circulation quantity when calculating the currency market value.
Binance updates the letter approval content and adds "token unlocking" information
"Update token unlocking information in a timely manner" is also a suggestion that users have previously made to Binance. Now this information transparency has been completed in Binance's web version and updated version of the App.
Regarding Binance's subsequent new coin listings, He Yi can only remind users "not to rush in", but to take the time to understand the real intentions of the project and the team. "After all, the current KPI of listing coins determines that Binance will launch some popular projects, and these projects do not always bring continuous value. We also hope to improve the health of the entire market through more innovation and transparency."
(Disclaimer: Please strictly abide by the laws and regulations of your location. This article does not represent any investment advice)
