Binance Alpha 150 days old: the optimal solution to the foam

Author: Kaori

Binance Alpha has formed a value consensus among multiple circles such as project parties, wool circles, retail investors, etc. The project "provides" to Alpha and wool Party to batch KYC to start a new round of wool circles, while retail investors are making profits between points restrictions, lucky tail numbers and trading wear.

From the beginning of launching Alpha, which is the best exit window for meme coins, to the earliest rounds of "violent money delivery" in Alpha2.0, to the launch of points-based screening users and token issuers queuing up to launch Alpha, Binance has gradually regained the traffic and pricing power of the on-chain market. Behind all this is the expression of Binance's ambition to reorganize the ecosystem through liquidity discourse power on the asset side after being left behind by OKX on the product side.

150 days later, Binance Alpha has evolved from a wallet function to the structural mechanism with the most discourse power of the entire crypto market.

What did Alpha do in 5 months?

In 2024, the crypto market ushered in a bull boom under the dual stimulation of Bitcoin spot ETF approval and the meme frenzy. However, under the appearance of liquidity recovery, a deeper problem is that the pricing mechanism between the primary and secondary markets is gradually failing. The valuation of VC projects is inflated, the coin issuance cycle of the project party has been repeatedly extended, and the threshold for user participation continues to rise, and the final listing window often becomes the end point for the project party and early investors to collectively cash out, leaving retail investors with only a mess.

It is against this backdrop that Binance launched the Binance Alpha on December 17, 2024. At first, it was just an experimental feature in the Binance Web3 wallet for discovering quality projects, but it quickly evolved into the core tool for Binance to restructure pricing power in the on-chain market.

Binance Lianchuang Heyi admitted in a Space that responded to community disputes that there is a problem of "the peak of the opening" of Binance coins, and admitted that the traditional currency mechanism is no longer sustainable under the current size and regulatory constraints. Binance has also made mechanisms such as voting listing and Dutch auctions to restrict the price performance of the new currency after it is launched, but the effect is always unsatisfactory.

Therefore, Alpha Coin Listing became a strategic alternative within the controllable range of Binance at that stage.

"Put these hot projects in the market in Binance Alpha, projects entering the observation area cannot guarantee Binance. Only when a project is beneficial to society can it have income and profits, and it can share the income with users." In Space, He Yi made such a promise.

On December 18, Binance Alpha announced the first batch of projects. Until February 13, Binance Alpha launched more than 80 tokens in BSC, Solana, Base and other ecosystems, mainly meme and AI tokens. However, the market did not reduce the crusade against the VC currency that fell as Binance expected, and the launch of Alpha became the last stop for meme currency.

It was not until early February 2025 that the BSC ecosystem opened up the channel between Alpha and traffic from the test coin TST. It was also from that period that Alpha began to launch non-meme tokens, such as ONDO, MORPHO, AERO, etc.

In March, due to the shutdown of OKX DEX, Binance Wallet launched Binance Alpha2.0 at this point in time. By directly integrating Binance Alpha into CEX, users can directly use the funds in their own funds to trade Alpha tokens. As a result, Binance wallet transaction volume and active users surpassed the market, accounting for 80% of the transaction volume of crypto wallets, becoming the steepest link in the wallet product growth curve.

At the same time, Binance's screening standards for Alpha users are also constantly evolving. Since the initial "task-making points system" is not enough to form an effective distinction, the platform quickly introduced systems such as lucky tail number and point consumption to stimulate more frequent interaction behaviors. This mechanism takes into account the continuity and differentiation of user participation, and also provides project parties with relatively accurate airdrop target groups.

The project party is no longer confused

Since the launch of the Alpha mechanism, the multiple-choice questions of the project party have changed.

Faced with the high uncertainty of the main website's currency listing window, the pressure of cashing out of the on-chain community, and the inverted valuation of VC books, more and more teams are beginning to realize that if you want to gain market attention and liquidity support, it may be far from enough to tell stories, maintain the community or wait for the traditional currency listing process.

Instead of continuing to spend on routes where results cannot be calculated, it is better to actively adapt to the new paradigm brought by Alpha. In the Alpha system, token flow, airdrop quota, and transaction activity can be directly reflected as observable data on the platform. And these data are likely to be the pre-ticket tickets to the official launch of Binance, and it can also gain market attention when going to Alpha, with almost no negative impact.

Because of this, the project parties began to quickly adjust their strategies and no longer be hesitant about the multiple pulls of whether to send out, whether to go up or when to go up, but instead tailor a "low-cost Binance" execution model for the Alpha mechanism in a targeted manner.

Backstab community becomes the norm

Binance Alpha currently has two options for listing coins, either circulating projects or new projects that are not circulating, and there are different detailed indicators to measure these two main lines. This makes Alpha an entry point with clear systems and clear standards.

At the execution level, Binance Alpha's pace of spot trading at the main site is extremely restrained, and the spot quota in the past five months is far lower than Binance's previous spot currency listing pace. This limited and scarce design builds a typical Web2-style growth flywheel - spending money to obtain traffic, setting thresholds to screen users, and continuously optimizing intra-volume rules, ultimately realizing user retention and ecological structural strengthening.

To enter this system, project parties usually need to make significant adjustments, including but not limited to deploying or mapping tokens to BSC, redesigning incentive structures, and sacrificing some communities' original airdrop quotas. To a certain extent, Alpha is not just a wallet product, but more like a lightweight and centralized on-chain coin issuance protocol, which cooperates with the Binance platform's data coin selection and risk hedging needs.

After Zora of Base Eco announced its first launch of Binance Alpha, someone in the hair-beating group said, "Don't expect too much. Maybe it's better for others to play Alpha after a few years." Unexpectedly, the words came true. Binance Alpha users who meet the requirements received 4,276 ZORA tokens, worth nearly 90U. However, many users in the community who have been paying attention and participating in ecological activities since Zora went online, and they only received 30U airdrops, and even only single-digit tokens.

 Screenshot of the airdrop income posted by Zora ecological users in the community; Source: @zkgoudan

This situation of bypassing the original community to directly serve Alpha users is not uncommon in projects that Alpha has been launched.

Taking PRAI as an example, according to feedback from users participating in its KOL round, "If you get it in VC and KOL rounds, you will lose." On the one hand, the project adopts a lock-in policy for community users to restrict the circulation of tokens; on the other hand, Alpha users do not have to bear the cost of early participation or fund lockout, and can obtain token airdrops worth nearly 100 US dollars based on wallet points and interaction records alone. This obvious incentive contrast has broken the original "ecological internal fairness" of the project.

Deposit users who have participated in the Sui eco-lending agreement Haedal told BlockBeats that Haedal's airdrop quota spans greatly, almost ignoring the cost of participation of early depositors, leaving only significant returns for Alpha users.

Before MilkyWay, which had a liquid staking derivatives agreement on Osmosis, went online to Alpha, community users not only suffered the decline of TIA, but the project party allocated very little share to early users, and not only had to lock positions but also do tasks to unlock them. Those who only hold NFT but do not bind the points system will not be airdropped, and the window period is also very short, and the returns are much lower than those of Alpha users.

Although this approach of deviating from the project's native support group and re-tilting resources to Alpha users has sparked widespread discussion, it is a realistic choice for most project parties: under the premise of limited resources, giving priority to resource allocation to paths that can bring secondary liquidity and platform exposure is a strategy to maximize efficiency.

After launching Alpha

The core indicator of Binance Alpha's listing is how many chips it can provide, which is consistent with the concept of "embracing the Binance ecosystem and the BNB chain".

According to statistics from KOL AB Kuai.Dong, Puffer launched Alpha seven months after issuing the coins. According to on-chain data, the project party mapped about 3.16% of the tokens to the BNB chain, of which 1.24% were directly included in the Alpha user airdrop pool, and also injected nearly 500,000 USDC liquidity into PancakeSwap. According to comprehensive estimates, the total cost of Puffer for this Alpha airdrop is close to $3 million.

As AB said, "the cost is not small, but the returns are also obvious." The Binance CEX trading channel is directly obtained through the Alpha functional portal. Before obtaining futures or the main website listing, liquidity warm-up and market awareness paving have been completed in advance.

A similar path can also be seen in the star project Polyhedra of ZK track. Its token ZKJ entered Alpha without going to the Binance main site, becoming the first top 100 market capitalization tokens to be included in this mechanism. In order to support the price of the coin, the project party has successively launched pledge income and points competitions of up to 150%, attracting users to swipe transactions and accumulate wallet activity. In terms of strategy, perhaps the project party wants to accumulate influence with the help of Alpha internal indicators and ultimately promote the realization of Binance's listing decision.

 ZKJ has been at the top of Alpha\'s trading volume recently; Source: Panda Jackson (@pandajackson42)

This on-chain behavior - points return - The closed loop included in the platform reconstructs the game structure between Binance and the project party: in the past, "market value + community" decided whether it could be used for the market, but now it is the "on-chain data + Alpha performance" that dominates the pace.

The strategy for new projects is more radical. Since Stakestone launched Binance Alpha in mid-April, it has adopted an extremely proactive market strategy. First, it distributes 5% tokens through wallet IDO, and then covers Alpha users with 1.5% airdrop, releasing nearly 4% incentives to old users in the community, with a cumulative distribution of more than 10% of the total.

At the same time, the project party will directly invest part of the financing funds into the secondary market, guiding the currency price to remain stable in the early stages of public circulation. This series of operations will eventually be exchanged for the online channel of the Binance main site. As industry insiders familiar with the process said: "After the Binance listing standards change, projects no longer need to tell stories, but need to show data and control."

Retail Psychology

Compared with the project party's strategy of being proficient in calculations and careful layout, the role of retail investors seems complex and ambiguous.

In the traditional logic of new stocking, retail investors can obtain first-level arbitrage opportunities based on their information acuity and capital agility. However, under the points system constructed by Alpha, the profit paths of retail investors are institutionalized and transparent, and at the same time they have become highly inclined. What Alpha activates is not the imagination of currency price growth, but the on-chain conversion mechanism of "points-airdrop-springboard".

For some users, this mechanism does reconstruct the concept of fairness. If small and medium-sized users who have been retained in their wallets for a long time can remain active, even if the amount of funds is not large, they still have the opportunity to get a return from Alpha that far exceeds the cost. Since Alpha has launched the points system, according to BlockBeats statistics, if ordinary users participate in each Alpha airdrop and wallet new activity, they will receive nearly 1,700U of revenue.

However, the other side of high returns is a highly structured screening system. This point game that everyone can participate in on the surface actually sets hidden thresholds, which puts forward considerable requirements on the user's behavior path, transaction frequency and even the sustainability of participation.

Binance itself does not directly issue airdrops, but provides infrastructure such as points distribution, data screening, and user classification. The airdrop is undertaken by the project party, but who to send it to and what standards are determined by the Binance Alpha mechanism. The core of this system design is not "reward", but "screening". Whoever can be identified as a "high-value user" will continue to receive airdrops.

Questions also followed. Some users pointed out that the transaction volume on Alpha is different from the actual user needs. "There is no transaction without points and airdrops", which leads to inflated data on the project party and the user retention is apparent. "What is the difference between this incentive method and the ghost chain and pseudo-game airdrop that are completely useless after TGE?"

According to statistics from KOL KOL, in the statistical sample, only 22% of users can get enough points to get airdrops every day when trading normally, while the remaining people need to repeat the transactions continuously, or they can't keep up with the pace of points and give up participating.

But it is undeniable that in the context of the current scarcity of overall liquidity in the market and the lack of a continuous attention mechanism for projects, Alpha is still one of the few channels for rewards to do something. Under the premise that returns and certainty coexist, this mechanism is still very attractive. Under this system, the logic of participation of retail investors has shifted from value judgment to mechanism game, and their returns no longer depend on their judgment of the future of the project, but on their understanding and execution ability of the Alpha mechanism.

Who is the real beneficiary of Alpha?

Although retail investors and project parties have their own games in the Alpha mechanism, back to the overall framework, what Alpha really reshapes is actually the underlying relationship between the trading platform and the assets.

In terms of product experience and tool ecology, Binance does not have significant advantages over platforms such as OKX, but the liquidity entrance mechanism built through Alpha still allows it to retain a strong voice in the asset launch stage.

Even if the initial publication of the project is not in Binance, the traffic screening and points path provided by Alpha is enough to allow a large number of new coins to complete a round of market preheating and pricing anchoring before they are connected to the main trading pair. It changes the starting point of issuing coins and extends the influence boundary of Binance on the asset side.

The NXPC, which launched Alpha's chain game yesterday, is a good case. After the on-chain liquidity pool was opened, the Alpha airdrop interval was simultaneously distributed to points users shortly afterwards. The Binance contract and spot lag behind by nearly half an hour and several hours respectively, and there are also certain price differences on other trading platforms such as Bybit and Upbit. Trading windows at different rhythms determine the profits of funds in each stage and also strengthen the pre-emptive role of Alpha in liquidity startup.

In the past, the project was launched on Binance, which means that the level one pricing has been completed and the terminal has reached its destination. Now Alpha is the starting point for the project to be launched and the source of pricing. It has moved the cold start field that originally belonged to other trading platforms such as OKX and Bybit back to the Binance system. Once Alpha's project rises, there will be a reason to connect to Binance contracts and spots. The project is naturally willing to "provid" shares according to the rules, take out token shares and capital injections in exchange for platform exposure and liquidity preparation. This is the closed loop of traffic feeding back to the platform.

This also allows Binance to no longer bear the public opinion burden of "the top of the currency is the first" in the past. CZ once expressed its hope to eliminate the premium effect brought by Binance's listing and let the market return to fundamentals. Alpha is actually his path to fulfilling this sentence. He no longer directly takes "Binance" as the authority, but instead establishes a new liquidity screening mechanism through Alpha to level the starting line between projects, and then decides who can continue to move forward based on on-chain data.

At present, this path seems to be successful. Alpha is no longer a function in Binance's wallet. Behind this mechanism is Binance's re-understanding of its own role. Its success does not depend on whether the product experience is the ultimate, but on the fact that it brings Binance’s first-level asset organization capabilities from behind the scenes to the chain, open and quantifiable.

Compared to OKX's product polishing route in the wallet field, Binance chooses to exchange points for traffic and airdrop for attention. Winson, head of Binance wallet business, publicly stated that Binance wallet will not copy any competitive product model, but choose to develop in a different way, "the market does not need two identical wallets." He believes that instead of remaking the product, it is better to reconstruct the scene.

Faced with industry stubborn problems such as airdrop volume and transaction data distortion, Binance did not try to eliminate these behaviors, but built a mechanism to allow projects to prove their attractiveness first, and then observe whether they can form a stable user base and real transaction depth. The boundary between brush volume and real behavior is delayed in the Alpha score system and is also data-based.

But from another perspective, many people still believe that Binance Alpha has only successfully attracted the hair-fighting party, and has not attracted real transaction volume. When users choose on-chain behavior, they still will not use Binnace wallet as their first choice.

The past cycles were somehow “to VC”, and they raised money by telling stories, but now they are “to liquidity”, and Alpha is the anchor point for Binance to re-rule liquidity. In an era where VCs are no longer reliable, communities are lost, and product competition is in homogeneity, Binance Alpha may not be the optimal solution to innovation, but it is the most effective way to undertake the bubble.