Since CZ’s resignation, Binance barely missed a beat.
And it’s not like the odds aren’t stacked against it — even to the point that much of the world outside crypto has been outright hostile to it.
In the past couple of years, there have been a number of jurisdictional bans in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Tigran Gamaryan was jailed in Nigeria for eight months on false money laundering accusations.
Also, there is increasing competition among crypto exchanges. Bybit Bitget Gate.io and other offshore exchanges have expanded their presence to help fill the void left by FTX.
Binance remains the leading exchange by trading volume. CoinGecko reports that Binance is currently averaging $9 billion per day in volume. Bybit, with its $3 billion in volume, is far behind Coinbase ($2.6 billion) and Bybit.
Binance’s ability to serve memecoin traders what they want seems to be its key to success — at least at this part of the cycle.
Binance is the only exchange that controls 44% of the volume for memecoin on CEXs. Kaiko calculated this in December.
On today’s episode of the podcast, Empire’s Jason Yanowitz discussed some of these issues with Richard Teng, a new CEO (ish).
“I thought you guys would have to stop doing a lot of the things [Binance did] to get to the place it got to: Listing things early, getting out to new markets early,” Yanowitz said.
“But you guys are still listing a lot of memecoins. You’re still very early to listings. You have new Launchpool projects in the last couple of months — Binance has given users a lot more trading opportunities. It kind of goes against what I thought would happen.”
Binance has a dashboard that tracks new tokens to be listed in 2024. Nine of them are memes such as HMSTR BABYDOGE TURBO DOGS. The platform also recently added perps for AI coins — next-gen memecoins — AI16Z, ZEREBRO and GRIFFAIN with up to 75x leverage.
Teng replied by saying that Binance listed fewer coins than many of its rivals, which is a result of listing processes designed to protect its users’ interests.
“If you look at the number of coins that we list, it’s around 600. We are very, very stringent with the coin selection process on that front. We have published the listing criteria and we ringfence the listing team so much that we give them the time and space to do their independent due diligence.”
Co-host Santiago Santos then probed for an answer on listing fees — one of the last great lucrative aspects of crypto exchanges still opaque to outsiders.
“[Binance’s] distribution is unparalleled — when you think about the overall fees [for Launchpad listings], is it like a dollar amount or a notional amount — is it a token supply amount, and if so, I’m curious how that has evolved over time,” Santos said.
Teng refused to comment, stating that these details were extremely specific. Better luck next time, I guess.
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