Being listed on either COINBASE or BINANCE can do wonders for a project. Typically, it comes with an increase in trading volume and a larger buzz on social. This is further accompanied by a swift surge in prices.
However, all is not fair and transparent in the exchange game as rumors continuously appear that suggest top-tier exchanges are accepting ‘donations’ or payments as means for projects to get listed onto their exchanges.
In fact, in 2019 it appeared that Binance had asked Jared Tate, CEO and founder of DigiByte, for a total of $300,000 and 3% of the total token supply in order to get DGB listed on the exchange. Apparently, the exchange told Tate that this was for insurance for their customers against blockchain hacks and defects.
As you will see in this article, it does seem that Binance has walked back this stance and has actually listed DGB on their own accord.
However, recently, it seems that there have been a number of coins that have managed to get listed on Binance without the need to be voted onto the exchange or paying their way to be listed.
1. COMP
What is Compound?
Compound Finance is a decentralized open-source lending protocol that is built on top of the Ethereum network. It allows users to create money markets by lending their money to gain interest as well as letting other users borrow funds whilst paying interest.
The protocol is interesting as it does not utilize the typical order matching style in which borrowers are lined up directly with lenders. Instead, Compound Finance allows lenders to supply any listed asset to its established liquidity pool and immediately benefit from earning interest as soon as the asset is deposited.
At the same time, for users to borrow funds from the liquidity pool, a certain level of over-collateralization is required to ensure protection for the lenders. The borrower has to over collateralize the loan by depositing a certain amount of cryptocurrency into a smart contract. If the borrower can repay the debt with the interest then they will be free to re-access the deposited collateral.
The interest rates associated with lending and borrowing are determined by an algorithm that is based on the supply and demand of a token in any given market.
Compound has surged to the top of the DeFi rankings of total USD locked into the protocol. It currently sits at the number 1 position as it holds a total of $631 million locked into the protocol;
This has largely been due to the fact that the platform recently released its native governance token that has been called $COMP.
$COMP was distributed during mid-June and it is the starting process of the entire platform becoming decentralized. The $COMP token itself will allow users to have a say in the future direction of the platform as it will grant them voting rights in any governance matters.
When was it listed on Binance?
Binance announced that they would be listing the $COMP token on June 25th. They actually made the announcement 1 hour before the market went live and it caused COMP to surge by over 25% on Poloniex alone when it climbed from $210 to $260 in a short 5-minute period. This same price surge was also seen on the FTX exchange.
Interestingly, Binance did not actually provide any warning that they would be listing $COMP. This is contrary to what they typically do as they usually allow the community know that a coin is being listed a few days before the event actually takes place. Instead, Binance just posted the announcement in its support section for New Crypto Listings; here.
They did later announce the listing on Twitter;
Binance stated that they would be opening markets for COMP against BTC, BNB, BUSD, and USDT. In addition to this, they also stated that the COMP listing fee was actually 0 BNB.
Why was it listed on Binance without a fee?
Binance did not actually make any comment about why they decided to list $COMP. However, we can easily make some assumptions to draw up a rough idea of why they potentially did decide to list the coin.
Firstly, Compound Finance is actually backed by some very big players within the cryptocurrency industry. For example, they have managed to gather seed funding from venture capital firms such as Bain Capital Ventures, Andreesen Horowitz, and Plychain Capital. The fact that it has such powerful players behind it makes it a very promising and investment-friendly project which would mean that it shouldn’t cause any problems for Binance down the line relating to potential fraud or FCA regulation.
Another reason as to why Binance decided to list $COMP is the fact that there are so many eyes on the project right now. You only need to look at the Social Volume statistic from Santiment to see how many people have started to talk about $COMP during mid-June 2020;
You can see that during the end of May and early June - not too many people were even mentioning $COMP on Twitter. However, after the release of the $COMP token on June 15th 2020, we can see that the mentions of $COMP started to explode.
Typically, when a cryptocurrency is red hot - there are lots of people trading it. Cryptocurrency exchanges only make money when traders trade coins on their platform. It only makes sense for Binane to list such a hot cryptocurrency as the fee income would provide a great source of additional revenue. It would be an opportunity that is too good to pass up for Binance.
DigiByte
What is DigiByte?
DigiByte is a payment focused cryptocurrency platform that can boast about being faster, more secure, and more innovative than its competitors such as Bitcoin and other altcoins. The project has been around for a very long time as it was founded in 2014 by Jared Tate. This meanest hat the project has been battle-tested for over 5 years - proving to the community that it is a very robust blockchain.
One of the platform’s best features is its degree of decentralization. The cryptocurrency actually uses five different cryptographic algorithms for miners. This prevents one mining sector from being able to totally dominate the mining process of DigiByte.
In addition to the 5 different mining algorithms, DigiByte also uses an advanced difficulty stability mechanism that adjusts the difficulty for the miners to protect DigiByte from any malicious spam attacks.
The platform also released DigiAssets in 2019 which allows developers to build smart contract decentralized applications on top of the DigiByte blockchain.
When was it listed on Binance?
DigiByte and Binance have actually had a pretty tarnished history prior to the recent listing.
It all started in September 2019 when Jared Tate stating that Binance had asked him for $300,000 and 3% of the entire token supply to get DigiByte listed on Binance;
Tate was standing his ground and refusing to pay Binance to have a decentralized project listed on the centralized exchange. He explained to Binance that DigiByte had zero funds and was unable to meet such a request as a decentralized project.
Tate later continued to clarify that decentralized projects such not be holding ‘private talks’ and ‘side deals’ with a special interest;
He further elaborated further in a video posted on Twitter in which he explains that he is not exposed to centralized exchanges that are operating in a regulated manner. However, he is opposed to centralized exchange operating in a shady manner and disrespecting that everything decentralized blockchain stands for.
Tate continued to state that there have been deals in the past where exchanges asked for funds to list the project and eventually ended up running an exit scam and stealing DigiByte user funds.
He concluded the video by stating that centralized exchanges have come and gone over the years but the decentralized DigiByte blockchain holds strong. He also stated that this type of behavior was “disgusting” and it was helping the proliferation of scams and fraud that we see.
You can take a look at the video below;
Well, things went quiet for quite a few months until Binance made the following Tweet to surprise the DigiByte community by announcing that they had listed DGB on its exchange;
Binance listed DigiByte on 22nd June 2020 when it opened trading for DGB markets against BTC, BNB, and BUSD.
DigiByte actually surged by a total of 40% on the announcement of the listing as it climbed from $0.017 to reach as high as $0.024.
Furthermore, it appears that Binance had actually decided to list DigiByte without requesting for any payment at all. This was cleared up by DigiByte themselves with the following tweet;
Why was it listed on Binance without a fee?
So, why was DigiByte eventually listed to Binance without a fee after such a public blow out a year before?
Well, although Binance has not made any official statement regarding the listing we can only assume that they wanted to clear up any bad animosity that might have flared up from prior negotiations. The fact that Jared Tate made the request for 3% of the entire DGB supply and $300,000 public kind of put Binance in shady light which does not look good for a prominent exchange.
With the latest addition of DGB, this means that anybody who sees the prior history will know that any problems between the two entities are resolved now which is good for both Binance and Digibyte.
In addition to this, the fact that Jared Tate was standing his ground for so long could have been another reason as to why Binance caved and listed DigiByte. You see, you have to realize that DigiByte is a community-driven project - and that community is very, very strong. The DigiByte army can really make things happen if they want to.
If any project has such a strong community behind it, there will always be a need for trading to be available for community members. This was another opportunity that Binance could not pass on for any longer as they were previously missing out on all of the trading fees from not listing DigiByte.
Nexus
What is Nexus?
Nexus is a project that aims to take decentralization of blockchain to the next level by distributing nodes into space.
The Nexus team believes that the only way for true and full decentralization is to bypass traditional ground-based telecommunications networks and secure the network through satellites.
Through its Global Mesh Network, which includes low-earth satellites, the team at Nexus is on a mission to bring a new level of security and scalability to the blockchain.
Nexus has developed the Lower Level Database (LLD) which is lightweight to greatly increase the computing speeds. Because it runs on a distributed node network, the entire project is also highly scalable as it naturally adapts as the network grows. This is because of its 3D blockchain which was founded by the creator of Nexus, Colin Cantrell.
The 3D blockchain is expected to reach as high as 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) which greatly outclasses traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin (7 TPS) and Ethereum (25 TPS).
When was it listed on Binance?
Binance announced that they would be listing $NXS on June 6th 2018 with the following Tweet;
Binance would open trading markets for $NXS against BTC, BNB, and ETH.
Why was it listed on Binance without a fee?
Nexus was an interesting addition to Binance a couple of years ago. It was relatively unknown and seemed like a very outlandish idea. This is especially so when we consider the fact that they planned to launch rockets into space to create a decentralized network.
However, there was one piece of information that everybody seemed to overlook at the time.
This was the fact that Nexus had the relationships to be able to launch rockets.
You see, Colin Cantrell, CEO and founder of Nexus, is actually the son of a man called Jim Cantrell. Jim is an American entrepreneur and mechanical engineer who started to work for the French Space Agency (CNES) in 1990. He eventually went on to leave CNES and was approached by Elon Musk in 2001 to help in sending a mission to Mars using Russian rockets.
Yep, you guessed it. Jim, Colin’s father, actually helped Elon Musk to set up SpaceX.
This would definitely mean that Colin has the right network to be able to launch rockets into space. In fact, if you didn’t believe me - here is a picture of Colin Cantrell standing (second from the left) in front of a rocket;
It seemed that Binance might have actually been privy to information and decided to take a risk on listing a project that had such a grand mission in its ethos. If it worked it would be great for Binance and if it didn’t, there was not too much harm done for them.
