By Alex Liu, Foresight News
On March 20, 2025, Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, launched the "Vote to List" voting activity, handing over part of the decision-making power of token listing to the community. This crypto democracy experiment involving millions of users has attracted widespread attention in the industry, while also triggering in-depth discussions on the boundaries of community autonomy, market manipulation risks, and the feasibility of decentralized governance.
From centralized auditing to community governance
According to Binance's official announcement, the first round of voting will last until March 27. Users need to hold at least 0.01 BNB (about 6.2 US dollars) to participate. Each user can vote for up to 5 BNB Smart Chain ecological tokens. The first batch of candidates includes 9 projects: BANANAS31 (Banana For Scale), BID (CreatorBid), Broccoli (Broccoli), Broccoli (CZ'S Dog), KOMA (Koma Inu), SIREN (SIREN), mubarak (mubarak), TUT (Tutorial), and WHY (why). The top two in the final vote will enter Binance's professional due diligence process.
Regarding the vote-rigging in Binance's voting to list coins, Binance co-founder He Yi commented that they would ensure the fairness of the vote by clearing out cheating.
It is worth noting the dual balance mechanism in the rule design:
- Participation threshold and anti-vote-swiping measures: The low threshold of 0.01 BNB ensures broad participation, and the "vote-washing" technology is used to filter out fake accounts, maintaining openness while preventing manipulation
- The connection between community will and professional review: The voting result does not directly determine the launch, and it still needs to go through traditional due diligence processes such as compliance and security.
- Ecosystem Focus Strategy: The first phase of limited BNB chain tokens will not only strengthen the cohesion of the ecosystem, but also reduce the complex evaluation risks of multi-chain projects
This hybrid model of "democratic screening + professional review" was described by Cointelegraph analysts as "finding a compromise between the decentralized ideal and the centralized reality."
Community Game: Enthusiastic Support and Undercurrents
24 hours after the launch of the activity, related topics were discussed intensively on X. Most users welcomed the decentralization of participation rights, reflecting the market's desire for open governance rights. But there are mysteries beneath the surface:
There is an arms race between tokens: multiple project communities promise token airdrops and other rewards to attract token holders to vote; a large number of short-selling discussions: since only a few tokens will be listed as a result of the event, the price of unselected tokens may fall, and some people suggest that all tokens participating in the vote can be shorted to make a profit. After Binance launched multiple new contract trading pairs yesterday, all candidate currencies for this round of voting have been listed on Binance contract trading - "If you are not optimistic, you can short" is not empty talk.
This frenetic voting atmosphere can't help but remind people of the hot scene when Binance first voted to list coins in 2017. In response to the user's opinion that "Binance's voting mechanism for listing coins in 2017 was very effective", Zhao Changpeng said, "Voting was good at the beginning. But later it tore the community apart and caused project owners to attack each other. It felt like pvp. It's getting harder and harder to prevent cheating over time. You have to keep changing new models. You can still do it occasionally."
Mechanism Evolution: The Iterative Path of Eight Years of Voting History
Looking back at the development of Binance's coin listing mechanism, it is undoubtedly a history of constantly seeking a dynamic balance between centralization and decentralization. In the early stage from 2017 to 2019, Binance relied entirely on its internal team to review projects. Although voting for coin listings triggered a wave of enthusiasm at the time, it was also accompanied by chaos such as vote manipulation and vote buying.
Entering the adjustment period from 2020 to 2024, Binance temporarily shelved the voting mechanism and switched to more controllable modes such as Launchpad and Launchpool to list projects, and established an Alpha project library for long-term observation. By 2025, Binance restarted the voting activity with a new attitude, not only introducing a holding threshold and a vote-washing algorithm, limiting the voting scope to the pre-screened project pool, but also retaining the final veto power of professional due diligence.
Through coin holding verification and strict rule design, Binance attempts to build a healthier and more sustainable governance ecosystem.
Future play: Three possibilities for autonomous experiments
Looking ahead, this autonomous experiment may take three distinct development paths. Ideally, community consensus will allow high-quality projects to stand out, and anti-cheating systems will effectively purify the voting environment, thus forming a set of replicable governance templates.
In an unsatisfactory situation, bad money may drive out good money due to manipulation by market makers; the strategy of shorting all tokens may trigger a collapse of small and medium-sized tokens.
The compromise reality may be: some dark horse projects are screened out, and intermittent vote-rigging scandals force the platform to continuously optimize the rule design.
CoinMarketCap shows that the total number of cryptocurrencies currently exceeds 13 million
Behind the voting for listing coins is Binance’s latest attempt to increase traffic after getting rid of the regulatory dilemma. In this huge crypto empire, a super traffic closed loop formed by exchanges + wallets + public chains + communities + KOLs is taking shape. We will have to wait and see what kind of crypto storm it can stir up in the end.
