If we compare the crypto industry to a set of teeth, then the path of token listings over the years resembles an industry-wide orthodontic process. From the chaos of 2017 to the industrialized assembly line of 2025, every shift in how tokens are distributed has essentially been a correction of structural deformities in the industry and a challenge to the concentration of token supply.
In this process, project teams' pursuit of top-tier liquidity has evolved from early "volume battles" into today's "astronomical bride-price model" — paying fortunes to win the hand of exchanges. And exchanges themselves, fighting for survival, traffic, and fees, have evolved from early listing logic to pricing logic.
How exchanges, project teams, VCs, and traders have torn each other apart and loved each other; slandered each other and built each other up.
For you, a thousand times over.
Introduction
Teeth are a remarkably "miraculous" organ of the human body — and here is why: teeth are the only organ in the adult human body that we are permitted to deeply customize, move, and reshape through physical and biological means.
This "plasticity" allows us to counter the misalignment brought by genetics and the wear and discomfort brought by time.
We typically think of bones as hard and fixed — teeth are rooted in the alveolar bone, so they should be immovable. Yet orthodontics (braces) exploits precisely the fact that bone is a "dynamically active tissue." When braces apply a constant, gentle force to teeth, the alveolar bone on the compressed side senses the pressure — the body dispatches "osteoclasts" to resorb the bone there, making way for the tooth. On the opposite side, where a gap opens as the tooth moves, the body dispatches "osteoblasts" to fill in new bone.
The tooth simultaneously "destroys" bone and "rebuilds" bone — achieving a slow migration through the skeletal structure.
No other hard organ in the human body can do this. Unless you are extraordinarily gifted, you cannot shorten your femur or relocate a rib by applying pressure — but teeth can move.
The rules and policies governing token listings work the same way.
Part One: Listing = The Contest and Transfer of Asset Pricing Power
This article divides the listing pathway into four stages: Baby Teeth → Growing Teeth → Malocclusion → Orthodontic Correction. The thread running through all four evolutionary stages is a single question: who controls the asset's pricing power.
[Image: four-stage evolution diagram]
Stage One (Community Pricing) Pricing power rests with "shillers" and grassroots communities. Traffic is king — whoever shouts loudest is right. The result is bad money driving out good, and the market flooded with noise.
Stage Two (Exchange Pricing) Exchanges reclaim pricing power through IEO/Launchpad, acting as "gatekeepers" and "investment banks." The exchange's credibility endorsement becomes the core support for asset prices.
Stage Three (The Collapse of VC Pricing) VCs accumulate excessive pricing power in the primary market, leaving the secondary market unprofitable. Exchanges are forced to intervene, attempting through coercive means (airdrops) to "rob the rich to feed the poor" — but this is only a painkiller, treating symptoms rather than root causes.
Stage Four (Market/Derivatives Pricing) Capital in the game is no longer in spot — so pricing power is handed to more mature financial mechanisms. Through "derivatives trading" and pre-market trading, the market forms a fair price through full-scale competition, no longer dependent on a single narrative or a VC's valuation report.
Part Two: The Historical Context, Logic, and Evolution of Token Listings
Stage One: 2017–2018 — The "Baby Teeth Era" — A Wild Age Where Volume Is Justice
Pathway core: Direct Listing, Community Voting
The industry at this time was in a state of "no dentists." Listing logic carried a strong flavor of founder and community sovereignty — if a project could mobilize fans, it could get in the door.
Historical Context
This was crypto's "Genesis" phase. The industry was still purely a trading platform era; users primarily cared about convenience, speed, and low cost of trading. The mainstream exchanges of that time were mostly slow and unstable. Newcomer platforms built reputations through "radical simplicity" — no complex educational systems or social features, interfaces designed entirely for experienced professional traders.
Causes
User acquisition anxiety: Early-stage platforms needed low-cost, high-efficiency means to attract traffic away from competitors. "Community voting" was not just about selecting coins — it was a contest for community belonging.
Regulatory vacuum: Global regulation had not yet intervened. Exchanges had extremely high decision-making freedom, and the logic was brutally simple: whoever has more fans is the guarantee of liquidity.
The Play: Represented by Binance's "monthly community vote listing," users paid a tiny amount of tokens (e.g., 0.1 BNB) to cast a vote. Winning projects (such as Zilliqa, Pundi X) received top-tier traffic at almost no cost — but vote manipulation caused serious market misalignment, and the mechanism was ultimately abandoned.
Stage Two: 2019–2022 — The "Growing Teeth Era" — Ecosystem Walls and Premium Issuance
Pathway core: IEO (new issue subscription), Launchpad, Launchpool, Direct Listing
The industry began wearing braces labeled "ecosystem." Exchanges were no longer merely intermediaries — they became capable "dentists" with deep due diligence capabilities.
Historical Context
After the 2017 ICO bubble burst, fraud and technical exploits shattered the industry's credibility. The market needed a safer, endorsed method of fundraising. Simultaneously, the arrival of DeFi Summer (2020) made "liquidity mining" an industry consensus.
Causes
Credit repair: Exchanges introduced "bank-level" due diligence through Launchpad, acting as industry dentists — screening projects with real teams and technology, upgrading the ICO model into the more reliable IEO (Initial Exchange Offering).
Ecosystem closed loop: To consolidate user stickiness, platforms used Launchpool to forcibly empower their native ecosystem tokens (like BNB), allowing users to obtain new tokens through "holding" rather than "rushing to buy" — reducing participation risk.
2019–2020 (New Issue Subscription Frenzy): Launchpad (e.g., BitTorrent) introduced a priced issuance model. Project teams had to pass technical review and accept the exchange's pricing "suggestions" to ensure a "wealth effect" after listing.
2021–2022 (Lock-Up Empowerment): Launchpool became mainstream, empowering platform tokens — marking a shift from "buying new coins" to "mining new coins." Users locked platform tokens to receive new token distributions, forcibly binding project interests to the platform ecosystem.
Stage Three: 2023–2024 — The "Malocclusion Era" — High-Valuation, Low-Float Battles and Mechanism Upgrades
Pathway core: HODLer Airdrop, Launchpool
Historical Context
Venture capital returned to the market at scale, spawning a large batch of projects with valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars but extremely low circulating supply at launch (median of only 12.3%). This structure left secondary market retail investors with almost no profit space — only relentless, continuous unlock-driven selling pressure. Simultaneously, paying massive fines and CZ's imprisonment shifted the focus from "wild growth" to "global compliance and stability."
Causes
Pricing power conflict: VC-driven projects peaked at listing, stripping the market of price discovery function. Exchanges, to protect their ecosystems, had to intervene through coercive means to correct the imbalance — "returning the gains to the people."
Compliance pressure: From May 2024 onward, rules explicitly tilted toward smaller projects with higher distribution ratios, requiring project teams to lower the locked-float portion — aimed at combating VC manipulation of pricing.
Corrective measures: HODLer Airdrops and Megadrops targeting long-term holders were introduced, forcibly distributing "bride-price" directly to retail investors.
This was the most painful "periodontitis" stage of the industry's orthodontic process. VCs spawned large numbers of "peak at listing" projects; the median token circulation rate fell to 12.3%. Binance's industry report showed that new projects from 2024 alone carried approximately $155 billion in potential selling pressure over the following 12–24 months.
Because VCs manipulated pricing and retail investors bought at peaks — with listing being the top — market confidence collapsed severely. Secondary market underperformance caused spot trading volume to shrink.
To maintain the attractiveness of platform tokens, traffic, and trading demand, platforms began aggressively rolling out HODLer Airdrops (airdrops targeting long-term holders) and Megadrops (distribution combined with Web3 tasks). Listing policies gradually tilted toward smaller projects with higher distribution ratios.
Beginning in the second half of 2024, exchange derivatives mechanisms underwent a major upgrade — supporting perpetual contracts for a wider range of small coins and new tokens, allowing risk hedging and early price discovery through derivatives before spot liquidity matured. Exchange traffic and revenue also shifted toward perpetual contract trading.
Stage Four: 2025 — The "Orthodontic Era" — Multi-Layer, Industrialized Compliance Matrix
Pathway core: Binance Alpha Airdrop, Pre-Market Trading, Web3 Wallet integration
Historical Context
2025 has been called the "inaugural year of crypto industrialization." Total digital asset market cap broke through $4 trillion; Bitcoin became a macro asset. Perpetual contracts had become the dominant instrument in the derivatives market, accounting for over 75% of global crypto derivatives volume.
Causes
Pricing power shift: The market is no longer driven by narrative and shilling — it is driven by ETF flows, corporate earnings, and protocol revenue.
Efficiency optimization: Futures-first trading allows pricing through derivatives before new coins list on spot. 2025 data shows this pathway's conversion cycle shortened to 14 days — the fastest route into the mainstream.
Pre-market derivatives front-loading: This is the most important mechanism change of 2025. "Pre-Market Trading" was introduced, allowing users to trade perpetual contracts with up to 5x leverage based on external price feeds before tokens are officially listed on spot markets.
Small-cap deep liquidity: Because derivatives and pre-market trading attracted enormous traffic, attracting many small and mid-size market makers, the competitive and liquidity landscape for small-cap derivatives improved dramatically. This allowed new coins not yet listed on spot — like ESP, AZTEC, KITE — to quickly establish derivatives liquidity, with an average cycle from launch to official token issuance of approximately 14 days.
Binance Alpha (2.0): Functioning as a "pre-listing token selection pool," projects must first "grind through levels" here — proving their secondary market performance (including price trajectory and trading volume) — before progressively upgrading: derivatives → spot.
Part Three: The Power Shift from "Wild Frontier" to "Industrial Orthodontics"
[Image: power shift diagram]
Stage One: The Wild Frontier of "Volume Is Justice" (2017–2018)
This was the exchange's "primitive accumulation" period. They had almost no ability to evaluate project quality — and didn't need to. They only needed to answer one question: "How many new users will listing this coin bring me?"
This model cultivated the first generation of "purely mercenary" crypto users — with no loyalty to platforms or projects, going wherever there was meat to eat. This planted the seeds for the later liquidity mining tragedy.
Stage Two: The "Ecosystem Wall-Building" Era of Growing Teeth (2019–2022)
Exchanges reached the peak of their power, becoming the top of the food chain. They were no longer merely trading venues — they became super-nodes combining broker, investment bank, and regulator in one. IEO was the best tool for exchanges to monetize their brand premium.
The shift from "buying new coins" to "mining new coins" (Launchpool) was extremely clever. It successfully and forcibly channeled external project benefits to platform token holders, completing the value capture closed loop for platform tokens. This was the most critical step exchanges took in constructing their "moats."
Stage Three: The Growing Pains of the "Malocclusion Era" (2023–2024)
This was the blowback from VC over-expansion during the previous bull cycle. High FDV, low-float projects were essentially VCs using information asymmetry and capital advantage to systematically harvest retail investors.
The "$155 billion in potential selling pressure" mentioned above is a staggeringly large number. This explains why, even as Bitcoin hit new all-time highs, the altcoin market remained dead. Because the market was not only lacking fresh capital — it was continuously being bled dry by old project unlocks.
This illustrates the exchanges' helplessness: knowing everything is a trap, yet having to keep listing new projects to maintain competitiveness. Megadrop and HODLer Airdrop may look like innovations, but they are actually defensive measures — exchanges forced to "tax" VCs and redistribute to users in order to maintain ecosystem activity. This was a painful zero-sum game.
Stage Four: The Industrialized Future of the "Orthodontic Era" (2025 outlook)
In this stage, the industry finally recognized that spot markets alone, combined with simple IEOs, airdrops, and KOL rounds, could no longer accommodate the increasingly complex capital demands and community pressures.
In this stage, derivatives replace spot as the primary price discovery mechanism — alongside pre-market trading.
First, this is a massive paradigm shift. Previously: "first the asset exists, then the derivatives come." Going forward: "derivatives battle-price first, then spot asset delivery." This dramatically accelerates price discovery. How much a project is actually worth no longer needs to wait for the violent swings of listing day — it is settled in advance through the pre-market derivatives war between longs and shorts.
The emergence of Binance Alpha also provides an advance window for "industrialized listings." Alpha is effectively a "talent competition sandbox" or "decentralized curated market." It requires projects to prove their liquidity and resilience in the brutal real market before earning the right to "go official." This replaces the Stage Two manual due diligence with market mechanism.
Part Four: The Evolution of Listing Fees — From Listing Fee → Toll Fee → Share of the Dowry
This section does not target any individual exchange — it uses only publicly available information as the entry point.
[Image: listing fee evolution diagram]
The evolution of "listing fees" across these four stages is, in essence, a transfer of industry power: from the early "pay the platform for passage," to today's "give away your entire fortune to marry liquidity." We can trace this "bride-price" evolution to see clearly how the industry has been shaped step by step.
Stage One (2017–2018): From "Toll Money" to "Wedding Gift"
The early chaotic period was rife with rumors of enormous listing fees. Every exchange operated situationally, with an endless list of fee categories: listing fees, event fees, promotion fees, security deposits, and more.
Binance launched a transparency revolution in October 2018, announcing that 100% of all listing fees would be donated to a charitable foundation. Listing fees shifted from "direct platform revenue" to "brand credibility endorsement."
Stage Two (2019–2022): The Interest Exchange of "Ecosystem Dividends"
During this period, the model of directly collecting cash was abandoned. In its place came "ecosystem empowerment" — project teams were required to allocate tokens to the platform's users (primarily platform token holders).
Using Binance as an example: priced issuance through Launchpad, or liquidity mining through Launchpool.
Although there was nominally no "listing fee," project teams had to set aside a certain percentage of tokens (typically 2–3% or more of total supply) as distribution chips. This portion no longer flowed into the exchange's pocket — it flowed into the hands of "partners" capable of sustaining the platform ecosystem.
Stage Three (2023–2024): "Forced Quotas" Pushing Back Against VC Monopoly
As "high valuation, low float" tokens proliferated, exchanges began forcibly intervening in benefit distribution. This era saw the famous rumor of the "x% token listing fee," sparking a major industry debate. The official response clarified that the project tokens in question were not handed to the exchange — but were required to be used for user airdrops and community rewards.
HODLer Airdrops, Launchpool, and Megadrops were rolled out — forcing project teams to "dilute" VC pricing power at listing through large-scale token distributions.
Stage Four (2025–): The "Spend Everything on the Bride-Price" Value Inversion
By 2025, the "bride-price" for entering the spot main board had reached the apex of competitive escalation. The following phenomena have emerged:
Distribution ratio rising: Average distribution ratios have stabilized at 3–7% of total token supply (from Alpha through to spot listing).
Security deposit mechanism: In addition to tokens, project teams typically need to deposit approximately $250,000 as a security deposit (refundable after 1–2 years) and prepare at least $500,000 worth of BNB for liquidity pools.
Marketing package: Approximately 1% of supply for platform marketing.
From 2017 to 2025, the logic of listing costs has undergone three major leaps:
2017–2018: Platform collects money (toll).
2019–2022: Ecosystem sharing (empowerment).
2023–2025: Scatter wealth to save the market (correction).
Today's "listing fees" have fully evolved into a customer acquisition cost. To obtain top-platform liquidity, project teams pay token values that often exceed their total financing raised. This "bride-price model," while guaranteeing users' initial returns, also leaves many projects nearly emptied of their future growth chips on their "wedding day."
Part Five: As Industry Participants — What Should Be Said?
This text is not merely a historical review — it is an evolutionary report on the survival philosophy of exchanges and project teams.
It illustrates how exchange players represented by Binance have adjusted their positioning across different cycles: from the initial "traffic catcher," evolving into "ecosystem landlord," and after encountering the crisis of "VC harvesting," ultimately choosing to evolve into "industrialized financial infrastructure."
The listing of the future is no longer a simple "bell-ringing ceremony" — it is a complex, multi-layered financial engineering exercise. For project teams, the era of only knowing how to write white papers and raise VC funds is definitively over. For retail investors, the window of "mindlessly chasing new issues and getting rich" has also closed — what the future requires is more professional trading ability and a genuine understanding of derivatives instruments.
What? You say exchange listing rules are inflexible?
Aren't teeth pretty rigid too? 😂
Orthodontics takes time.
For you, a thousand times over.
Source: https://x.com/agintender