Binance Alpha Points "Shura Field": A Web3 Wallet War that swallows 90% of the market share

Author:Frank , PANews

Recently, Binance Web3 Wallet has caused huge waves in the Web3 Wallet market with its innovative "Alpha" gameplay, and its market share has skyrocketed, accounting for 90% of the market, which is eye-catching. Behind this phenomenon is its exquisite points airdrop mechanism, strategic adjustments to competitors, and the chain reaction and significant recovery of the BNB Chain ecosystem caused.

How can Binance Alpha cleverly utilize market gaps and user psychology to achieve "whale swallowing and eroding" expansion? Under the appearance of the "gold rush", how much does the "involved" pressure faced by users and the real benefits? Is this a brief traffic carnival, or a model innovation that is enough to lead industry changes?

Opponents' empty and points gameplay whale swallows and erodes the wallet

market

Since its launch, Binance Web3 wallet’s market share has exploded. Dune data shows that by May 12, 2025, Binance Web3 Wallet accounted for as much as 95.7% of the total transaction volume of all tracked Web3 Wallets, ranking first. This is a significant jump from 54.1% in March 2025. On May 10, 2025, Binance Wallet's single-day peak transaction volume exceeded US$930 million, and on April 22, this figure was only US$76 million.

BNB Chain's ecological activity is also boosted by Alpha. BNB Chain's TVL also increased significantly, with growth of more than $6 billion from early 2024 to May 2025. This is closely related to the improvement of Binance Alpha. According to official data, half of the top 20 Alpha tokens in the trading volume are BSC native projects. Of the top 10 new active users, 90% are BSC tokens, with 6 projects having more than 20% new user share. The on-chain BSC data also increased significantly: the past week, the number of new users increased by more than 1 million daily addresses and more than 2 million active addresses. The total number of BSC independent addresses has reached 552 million. Judging from these data, Binance Alpha is becoming an important engine for BNB Chain's activity and capital inflow.

It is worth noting that the sharp growth in Binance Web3 wallet market share is highly consistent with the time when competitor OKX suspends its DEX aggregator service. On March 17 this year, OKX announced the suspension of DEX product aggregator trading service, and the OKX wallet market share plummeted from about 50% to 3.6%. Almost at the same time, on March 18, Binance announced the launch of the Binance Alpha2.0 test version, integrating Alpha transactions directly into the Binance Exchange.

There are also obvious changes in the data. From March 10 to March 17, Binance Wallet's market share of transaction volume was only 8.3%, and by March 24, Binance Wallet's market share increased to 50.2%. Become the wallet application with the highest market share.

On April 17, BinanceAlpha announced that it will launch GM tokens and launch airdrop plans. BinanceAlpha's search index began to rise rapidly, and its trading volume also changed significantly. Trading volume from April 17 to April 24 reached US$184 million, more than triple from 57.94 million the previous week. As the popularity of points-based gameplay on social media increased, the trading volume reached US$1.574 billion in the week ended May 5, an increase of 27 times compared with the week before the launch of airdrop gameplay. This also boosted the wallet transaction volume on the entire chain to US$1.876 billion, breaking the historical record.

Alpha users’ “sweetness” and “burden”

From the root of this explosive growth, it comes from Binance Alpha's point airdrop gameplay. The Binance Alpha Points System is a complex mechanism designed by Binance to incentivize users to participate, screen active users and assign airdrops or TGE qualifications. The points are mainly allocated through the user's transaction volume, balance and other data on Binance Alpha, and then set points thresholds in each airdrop activity to determine which users can participate in the activity.

However, with the surge in the number of users, this point gameplay is becoming a new inverter Shura field. There are two key assessment indicators for this point mechanism: one is asset balance and the other is daily trading volume.

The balance of assets is divided into four levels. Total Asset Value $100 to <$1,000: 1 minute per day; Total Asset Value $1,000 to <$10,000: 2 minutes per day; Total Asset Value $10,000 to <$100,000: 3 minutes per day; Total Asset Value $100,000 and above: 4 minutes per day.

In terms of trading volume, buy $2 equivalent tokens: get 1 point; buy $4 equivalent tokens: get 2 points; buy $8 equivalent tokens: get 3 points; buy $16 equivalent tokens: get 4 points; buy $32 equivalent tokens: after getting 5 points, every time the purchase transaction volume is doubled, an additional 1 point (for example, buy $64 and get 6 points, buy $128 and so on). It is generally believed that trading $32 a day to get 5 points is a relatively cost-effective option.

In addition, this kind of points is calculated based on 15-day scrolling, which means that users cannot go through once and for all, and they need to continuously brush points to maintain the level of points.

This point gameplay has several relatively obvious attractiveness to users. First, the rules are clear, and users can fully predict the number of points they can obtain based on their own strategy to catch up with the airdrop threshold. Second, there is basically no first-mover advantage under this point system. Later users can also participate and can also obtain points levels similar to those of the first-mover users.

However, as the intra-volume intensifies, this threshold for points is constantly increasing. Increased from the earliest $50 trading volume or $100 asset balance standard to the latest project DOOD to 168 points. According to this standard, a new user needs to maintain his daily points of more than 11.2 points to participate in this airdrop. According to calculations, users who meet the conditions need to meet the position of more than US$1,000 and conduct transactions of more than US$1,024 per day to accumulate enough airdrops. Including the on-chain fees and transaction slippage costs, the total cost of this may reach more than US$60. Compared with the final value of the airdrop, the final value of the airdrop is 81 US dollars, and you can get a yield of about 35%. However, the opportunity cost of the principal of $1,000 must be considered. Compared with the total capital investment, the return rate of 15 days is about 2%. This rate of return may not be as good as the increase of the first token, but it is relatively more stable, so many studios choose to make batches of accounts and invest in it.

Traffic carnival or paradigm revolution?

In fact, is Binance Alpha really a new type of airdrop big hair?

DOOD's airdrop activity announcement revealed user thresholds that meet the requirements. A total of 30271 accounts meet the requirements. Calculated based on the airdrop amount of about US$81 for each account, the overall airdrop scale of this airdrop activity is about US$2.48 million. The corresponding address data was not disclosed in other token airdrop activities, so the specific amount could not be obtained, but the estimated scale should be similar. For a project airdrop, the scale of millions of dollars does not seem to be high, especially compared with the airdrop scale of hundreds of millions or even more than one billion US dollars such as Hyperliqued and Movement, it is even worse than the airdrop volume of a single large-scale player.

However, judging from the publicity effects and transaction data brought to the ecosystem, Binance Alpha's input-output ratio is undoubtedly eye-catching. In essence, this kind of transaction mining similar to that popular a few years ago has similarities. With Binance's effect obvious, many exchanges are also launching similar gameplay.

On May 7, Bybit announced the launch of the WEB3 Points Program, where users can earn WEB3 points by completing tasks such as holding crypto assets, conducting redemption transactions, and inviting friends.

On May 5, OKX Exchange announced a major feature upgrade to the built-in DEX aggregator of its self-custodial wallet OKX Wallet. Several new functions such as on-chain market analysis, intelligent fund tracking and Meme mode have been added. As of May 11, OKX Wallet's market share rebounded to 8.5%.

In the process of exchanges competing for each other to grab the wallet market, some traditional wallet applications have become helpless targets. In June 2023, MetaMask's trading volume market share will reach more than 60%. By May 2025, only 2.9% remain, and Binance-based Trust Wallet is also facing a similar dilemma.

Overall, Binance Alpha has brought about a new round of hair-fighting craze through the points system, similar to liquidity mining in early exchanges, and stimulates trading activities through potential incentives. On the one hand, it is an effective tool for Binance Wallet, BSC and other ecological products to gain market share and enhance user activity. Through carefully designed points and airdrop mechanisms, it has successfully attracted a large number of users and funds. It even erodes the market share of competitors to a certain extent. There is a clear positive correlation between the recovery of BNB Chain and the push of Alpha, forming a "Alpha-BNB Chain flywheel effect".

On the other hand, for users, the 15-day rolling points, points combustion mechanism and continuously increasing airdrop threshold force users to fall into a "Alpha treadmill"-style continuous high-intensity transaction. The real net income is often difficult to accurately measure, and faces many hidden costs such as slippage and gas fees. For many ordinary users, the "gold rush" may gradually evolve into the involuntary effect caused by the "sweatshop" model, which is spreading from users to exchanges. If the input-output ratio of this airdrop falls below the profit line, today's lively scenes may also be quickly cooled in a short period of time.

But for the industry, there is indeed a lot to learn from in the design of Binance Alpha, especially for projects that have expected airdrops to be issued. Binance Alpha is a classic case of spending a small amount of money to do big things.