My lord, the era has changed again.
After the tariff turmoil, the market has shifted from bear to bull in a small cycle. Besides the cryptocurrency price fluctuations and sporadic project highlights, there's a main storyline running through crypto users' daily lives - How many points did you earn on Binance Alpha today?
According to X user @btguagua, after the points system was launched on April 25, by May 15, Binance had conducted 15 "money-throwing" activities in the form of "airdrops + TGE events" for users. Yesterday's $NXPC airdrop could reach around $700 per account at its highest price point.
If you have consistently tracked and participated in Alpha while maintaining qualifying points, based on the highest token listing price, a single account could earn close to $2,000 within twenty days. Even after deducting trading friction costs, it's a considerable return.
In less than a month, the short-term earnings from participating in Binance Alpha have crushed the currently less-favored farming track.
From Chicken Ribs to Hot Cake
When "Binance Alpha 1.0" was first launched, apart from the initial few days when the "Binance Spot Candidate" concept brought some market excitement and boosted tokens' prices, the overall Alpha segment seemed relatively lackluster. It would list some then-popular meme tokens or tokens from Binance wallet TGE events. Many meme players and project parties even used Binance Alpha as the final stop for short-term liquidity. Later, "listing on Binance Alpha" could hardly be considered a positive signal, and the trading volume of the Alpha segment quickly declined, seemingly moving further from Binance's initial "growth" goal.
Although "Binance Alpha 2.0" transplanted the Alpha interface into the exchange, the data showed minimal effect. The real game-changer was the long-discussed "points access system".
According to the data panel by Dune user @pandajackson, after introducing the points system, Binance Alpha 2.0's trading volume increased exponentially. As of May 15, Binance Alpha's daily trading volume reached $771 million.
According to the data panel by Dune user @lz_web3, Binance Wallet's short-term trading volume also dominates the entire wallet track.
From the trading data alone, Binance's growth strategy has successfully attracted market attention and capital.
Market-wide Participation: Who Wins, Who Loses?
From market discussions and user feedback, most people are satisfied with Binance's money-throwing activity, with multiple market parties enjoying the dividend. Users who meet the points threshold are the most direct beneficiaries. Whether individual retail investors or cluster workshops, they've all somewhat ridden Binance's manufactured trend and earned the first wave of "new asset issuance" benefits.
For individuals maintaining participation, daily discussions, checking, and earning Alpha points have become a fixed task. Watching steadily growing Alpha points feels like securely holding an asset with guaranteed returns.
For Binance Alpha, the earnings represent a "stable happiness" in the short term. But for farming workshops with batch account creation capabilities, this seems to be a true major opportunity.
"Many projects are now reducing human and capital investment, and are focusing entirely on Binance Alpha," said Lv Ge (pseudonym), who runs a farming workshop, told TechFlow. With nearly $2,000 net earnings per account in twenty days, the return cycle and rate far exceed over 90% of crypto projects. Compared to most crypto projects that require "at least six months" with uncertain returns, Binance Alpha's "instant feedback, one-time recovery" model is exactly what farming workshops dream of. Even upcoming "top-tier" projects seem dim in comparison to the current high-density money-throwing.
And from many farming bloggers' feedback, farming Alpha has become a short-term consensus......
For project parties, launching on Binance Alpha has become an excellent traffic and exposure opportunity. Simultaneously, it can serve as a "point-farming target" to gain long-term liquidity, with popular assets like $ZKJ and $B² seeing continuous trading volume growth.
According to X user @_FORAB, Binance Alpha's first listing schedule is currently booked until mid-June. Despite numerous restrictive rules, project parties are still eager to secure this massive traffic.
For peer exchanges, Binance's money-throwing strategy and growth data are truly tempting. During the Binance Alpha activity's peak, various exchanges have launched their own money-throwing growth activities.
Of course, even amid everyone's celebration of earnings, some are still "losing money".
The most direct losers are those who bear trading friction to earn points but fail to receive airdrops due to insufficient scores.
According to X user Gu He.hl (@ZKSgu), under the Alpha points mechanism, many users choose to farm points without considering friction costs. In this process, if they don't select assets and set slippage carefully, they might incur significant losses. Moreover, point acquisition difficulty increases exponentially - there's minimal point difference between hundreds of thousands in trading volume and thousands, but friction costs could be hundreds or thousands of dollars more.
Additionally, besides directly losing money from point farming, many airdrop users genuinely participating in project interactions are suffering "invisible losses" under Binance Alpha's coverage: To ensure participating Alpha users' earnings, projects listed on Binance Alpha's first launch must provide substantial token allocation and lock liquidity. Some project parties choose to deduct tokens originally reserved for community users and transfer them to Binance Alpha for activity airdrops. In this transfer, some "project community users'" funds move into "Binance Alpha users'" pockets. This directly interrupts Web3 projects' user growth, instead "domesticating" native users within the exchange through a centralized method.
When Will the Hustle End?
Previously, people were criticizing the point system of project airdrops, a practice that strings along users' time, energy, money, and expectations, causing participants to engage in crazy internal competition. However, perhaps due to quick and genuine positive feedback, the market's criticism of Binance Alpha's point system has diminished, with more praise for its returns.
On the positive side, Binance Alpha has guided market enthusiasm to some extent in an environment without a main narrative, and its money-giving activities have benefited ordinary users. Meanwhile, the activities of listing tokens have gradually demystified the process of "listing on Binance".
From a negative perspective, the current main method of obtaining Alpha points is still mechanical point farming, which essentially serves no purpose other than generating data for wallets and project parties. Many people have spent money and suffered high slippage losses on the chain, yet cannot obtain returns in this crazy competitive environment.
According to the current development momentum, the participation threshold for Alpha rewards will continue to rise. Moreover, Alpha activities will tend to become more actuarial and intensive, where missing just one point might disqualify participation, and the difficulty for small-capital ordinary users will increase exponentially.
Summary
Binance Alpha's overwhelming momentum reminds one of Qin State in "Records of the Grand Historian" - 'sweeping the six directions, capturing諸侯, splitting the world, swallowing eight horizons', with a fierce approach and rapid expansion of scale and influence.
However, this expansion seems too fast. As they say, "A wildfire's momentum does not necessarily burn long." Any mode that burns market expectations too quickly must face sustainability challenges. The current short-term high returns seem more like Binance paying to educate users - as long as they first draw users' time, money, energy, and attention, long-term planning can be discussed later.
The difficulty for users to obtain returns has indeed increased. The current point deduction system is testing participants' research abilities. The era of farming airdrops by simply lying down is over, and future returns may belong to those skilled at project assessment.
From a user participation perspective, high-certainty positive EV opportunities like Binance Alpha are rare even across an entire bull-bear market cycle. Controlling the dividend window is crucial. As for how long this dividend period will last or whether Binance Alpha will negatively impact the market later? "If it's really hustle-ed to the point of no more dividends, we'll find the next opportunity. No one can predict the future, but opportunities must be seized," said Brother Lü from the Farming Studio in an interview.
