Binance Alpha, 150 days old: the best solution to deal with the bubble

Binance Alpha has formed a value consensus among project parties, farming communities, and retail investors. Project parties are "offering up" to Alpha, farming communities are doing KYC in batches to start a new farming journey, while retail investors navigate between point restrictions, lucky number endings, and trading wear to profit. From the initial launch of Alpha as the best exit window for meme coins, to the early "forceful money-giving" of Alpha 2.0, and then to introducing a point system to screen users and token issuers queuing to launch on Alpha, Binance has gradually reclaimed on-chain market traffic and pricing power. Behind all this is Binance's ambition to reorganize the ecosystem through liquidity discourse after being left behind by OKX on the product side. After 150 days, Binance Alpha has evolved from a wallet function to the most authoritative structural mechanism in the entire crypto market. In 2024, the crypto market ushered in a bull market boom under the dual stimulation of Bitcoin spot ETF approval and meme craze. However, beneath the surface of liquidity recovery, a deeper issue is that the pricing mechanism between primary and secondary markets is gradually failing. VC project valuations are inflated, project token issuance cycles are repeatedly extended, user participation thresholds continue to rise, and the final listing window often becomes an endpoint for project parties and early investors to cash out, leaving retail investors with nothing. It was against this background that Binance launched Binance Alpha on December 17, 2024. Initially, it was just an experimental feature in the Binance Web3 wallet for discovering quality projects, but it quickly evolved into Binance's core tool for reconstructing pricing power in the on-chain market. Binance co-founder He Yi admitted in a Space responding to community disputes that Binance's token listing has an "peak at opening" problem, and frankly acknowledged that traditional listing mechanisms are difficult to continue under current scale and regulatory constraints. Binance had previously attempted voting listings and Dutch auctions to constrain new token price performance, but the results were always unsatisfactory. Thus, Alpha listing became a strategic alternative within Binance's controllable range. "By placing projects with market hotspots in Binance Alpha, projects entering the observation zone are not guaranteed to be listed on Binance. A project can only have income and profit when it is beneficial to society, and then possibly share returns with users," He Yi promised in the Space. On December 18, Binance Alpha announced its first project list. By February 13, Binance Alpha had launched over 80 tokens from BSC, Solana, Base, and other ecosystems, mainly focusing on meme and AI tokens. However, the market did not reduce criticism of VC tokens dropping immediately as Binance expected, and being listed on Alpha instead became the final stop for meme coin expectations.

According to crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong's statistics, Puffer launched Alpha seven months after token issuance. Based on on-chain data, the project mapped approximately 3.16% of tokens to the BNB Chain, with 1.24% directly allocated to the Alpha user airdrop pool, and also injected nearly 500,000 USDC liquidity into PancakeSwap. Comprehensive estimates suggest that Puffer's total cost for this Alpha airdrop is close to $3 million.

As AB said, "The cost is not small, but the benefits are obvious," directly obtaining Binance CEX trading channels through the Alpha feature entrance, and completing liquidity preheating and market awareness padding before listing on futures or the main site.

A similar path can be seen in the ZK track's star project Polyhedra, whose token ZKJ entered Alpha without being listed on Binance's main site, becoming the first top 100 market cap token included in this mechanism. To support token price, the project launched up to 150% staking rewards and point competitions, attracting users to generate trading behaviors and accumulate wallet activity. Strategically, the project may want to leverage Alpha's internal indicators to accumulate influence and ultimately drive Binance's listing decision.

ZKJ has consistently topped the Alpha trading volume chart; source: Panda Jackson(@pandajackson42)

This on-chain behavior - point rewards - platform inclusion reconstructs the game structure between Binance and project parties: previously, "market cap + community" determined listing eligibility, now "on-chain data + Alpha performance" leads the listing pace.

New projects' strategies are even more aggressive. After Stakestone launched on Binance Alpha in mid-April, it adopted an extremely proactive market approach, first distributing 5% of tokens through wallet IDO, then covering Alpha users with a 1.5% airdrop, and additionally releasing nearly 4% incentives to community veteran users, totaling over a tenth of the supply.

Simultaneously, the project directly invested part of its fundraising into the secondary market to guide token price stability during initial public circulation. These operations ultimately secured Binance's main site listing channel. As industry insiders familiar with the process say: "After Binance's listing standards changed, projects no longer need to tell stories, but instead need to show data and control."

Retail Investor Psychology

Compared to project parties' precise calculations and meticulous layouts, retail investors' roles appear complex and ambiguous.

In traditional new token allocation logic, retail investors could leverage information sensitivity and fund agility to obtain primary market arbitrage opportunities. However, under Alpha's point system, retail investors' profit paths become institutionalized and transparent, while also becoming highly competitive. Alpha activates not token price growth imagination, but the "points - airdrop - listing springboard" on-chain conversion mechanism.

For some users, this mechanism indeed reconstructs the concept of fairness. Long-term small and medium wallet users, if maintaining activity, can still obtain returns far exceeding costs even with limited funds. Since Alpha launched its point system, statistics show that if an ordinary user participates in each Alpha airdrop and wallet new token activity, they could earn nearly 1,700 USDC in returns.