260 points is Alpha's ultimate conspiracy! The era of retail investors is coming (with retail investor operation guide)
Behind the soaring threshold, there is actually a new balance in the three-way game between platforms, studios, and retail investors. "Binance Alpha's threshold has been raised to 260 points!" This news made countless players feel a tightness in their hearts. The first reaction is: retail investors are going to be in trouble, this game can't be played anymore. But the truth may actually be the opposite. When we see through the logic behind the 260 points, we will find that this is not only a rule adjustment by the platform, but also a dividend beneficial to retail investors. Next, I will analyze it from four aspects 🧐
01 Digital scams, cognitive traps under high thresholds On the surface, the requirement of 260 points is quite harsh. An account needs to average over 17 points a day for 15 consecutive days to meet the standard. This seems insurmountable for players accustomed to mindlessly grinding.
Cousin CZ's AMA is ongoing tonight It's very lively, and the bilingual switching is very smooth 🥸🥸 $BNB Cousin said that the Chinese community needs to strengthen unity
CZ
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[Replay] 🎙️ AMA. English and Chinese (only 2 I speak)
My brother-in-law's 350,000 yuan payment was stuck in the approval process for seventeen days, and someone wanted to 'weld' it to death using Vanar Chain @格格巫
My brother-in-law opened a plastic injection factory in the north of the city. It's not big, with about thirty people, specializing in providing plastic clips for local auto parts suppliers. Last year, just before Double Eleven, his factory almost stopped. It wasn't because there weren't enough orders, but because a payment of 350,000 yuan was stuck in the 'approval process' for a full seventeen days. The supplier didn't receive the money and refused to send the next batch of raw materials. The machines on the production line were waiting for materials, the workers were sitting around scrolling on their phones, and they were losing 20,000 yuan a day just in wages. During those days, my brother-in-law was so anxious that he had blisters all over his mouth, calling every day to urge them. The other side's response was always 'The finance department is processing it', 'The boss is on a business trip', 'Wait for the leader's signature.' He later told me something that I still remember:
#vanar $VANRY Oh no, today I was directly hit with 5 losses. A couple of days ago, Alpha was still somewhat polite to me, losing 2 every day, which I thought was acceptable. Unexpectedly, I lost a whole meal of pork knuckles today 😞😞
Looking at my vanry, it's almost moldy in my hand... and the current price is basically stuck at 0.006... it's really... so far from my cost line of 0.0095...
Switching to the price chart, 0.00638, the green number barely jumped. A 37% floating loss, not a disease focus, it's a compensation coefficient.
0.0095 is the premium belief I had when I entered. 0.0060 is the present value the market pays for this belief. The 0.0035 in between is the exchange difference I paid for the "inconsistent time units".
Will it go back? I don't know. I can only continue to wait, wait for a rebound, and if there is one, I definitely won't be obsessive. @Vanarchain
Vanar is betting on the enterprise adoption cycle. Enterprises are betting on the AI implementation cycle. AI is betting on the computational cost reduction cycle. Each cycle is two orders of magnitude longer than the K-line.
8% cross-border loss that colleagues endured for three months until discovering that Plasma had reduced the fee to 0.0003 dollars@Gegewu
Xiao Lin from the finance department sits diagonally across from me. He always has three piles of documents stacked on his desk, the rightmost pile has an orange label that says 'Overseas Payable'. In late months, the time he spends staring at that pile of labels noticeably increases. Last Wednesday afternoon, he suddenly came over with a thermos in hand, lowered his voice and said: 'I have a question for you, that... what chain is it, can you accept dollars?' I said you specify. He handed over his phone, and the screen showed an Excel screenshot with dozens of lines. The cursor was on one entry: Vancouver, design service fee, 3000 dollars.
#plasma $XPL It's almost the New Year 🧨 Binance is throwing money again, and I only received 0.38. I saw someone say they received 188 dollars, and another person said they received 58 dollars. I really don't know if it's true or a joke 😪😪😪 Anyway, it doesn't cost much, everyone can try their luck 🍀🍀
In addition, I've seen many people sharing their Binance New Year gift boxes these days, but I have nothing 🙂↔️🙂↔️ I can only look at my $XPL
After reading, I lost my mood…💔💔 0.14 was undoubtedly bought at the peak, and recently it has been hovering around 0.08, and this essay contest is ending today…
I can only hope that after the event ends, the project team can return to their previous routine, so 0.1 isn't impossible. If I lose less, I'll sell it, after all, I also need to start preparing some New Year goods… @Plasma
Plasma is a dedicated chain that allows you to transfer USDT without fees, instant arrival, and directly use USDT to pay for mining fees—your clients no longer have to ask 'ERC20 or TRC20', and your finance team no longer has to calculate 'which is worse, exchange rates or wire transfer fees'.
Mother's Messy Ledger and Vanar Chain's Long Experiment on 'Digital Notarization' @Gege Wu
My mother has a hard-covered notebook that has been used for over a decade, and the brown cover has worn and faded. It is not a diary, but an extremely complicated 'family interactions and shared expenses ledger.' Inside, it records every payment made by her and her siblings over the past several years for taking turns caring for our grandparents: grandmother's hospital fees, wages for caregivers, even a box of milk, and a taxi fare. Amounts, dates, reasons, and the person responsible are all written in her neat handwriting. During family gatherings, this notebook is brought out, and everyone gathers around, spending a good part of the afternoon verifying, reminiscing, and occasionally debating the reasonableness of certain expenses. The final result is often a 'roughly balanced' messy account, with some feeling they have paid too much and others believing they forgot to record certain expenses, but in order to avoid hurting feelings, it always ends with a phrase like 'let it be, we are all family.' My mother often says: 'Writing this down isn't about distrust; it's about being afraid that after a long time, even I won't remember clearly. But once it's recorded, it seems even harder to clarify.'
From a colleague's complaint 'such high fees make us seem very amateur'—how does Plasma elegantly solve the 'amateurish feeling' of Web3 payments? @Gegewu
As soon as the Monday morning meeting ended, my colleague Ajie sat next to me with a coffee, his brow furrowed. The overseas developer community he is responsible for has just completed a small module bounty task and needs to grant a Polish developer a reward of 300 USDT. This should have been the simplest task, but Ajie's payment process got stuck. 'Using the most conventional chain transfer, the fee is nearly 30 dollars, which accounts for one-tenth of the reward,' he said with a bitter smile. 'The other party asked if we could use another method? This fee makes him feel that we are very amateur.' Ajie's dilemma is a small yet sharp reflection of today's world where global distributed collaboration has become the norm. We are building a decentralized future, but the fundamental costs of value transfer often make this collaboration cumbersome and inefficient. This conversation did not stop at complaints; it unexpectedly opened the door to my rethinking of the current competitive landscape of public chains: when most Layer1 and Layer2 are competing to become complex 'supermarkets,' are they overlooking the most basic and frequent rigid needs of users—completing a payment with no burden, just like sending an email?
#vanar $VANRY The current price is between $0.006067 and $0.006513, with a transaction amount of $951,000.
These three data points reveal two key signals, in my opinion.
1. Increased volatility, but the core dilemma remains unchanged The price range volatility is about 7.4%, higher than the previous extremely narrow fluctuations. More importantly, the transaction amount has significantly increased to $950,000, more than doubling from the previous level of about $400,000. This clearly indicates that at this sensitive position of historical lows, the market's long-short divergence is substantially increasing. Some funds believe there is no further downside, beginning tentative buying; however, each small rise encounters strong selling, preventing the price from effectively breaking through. This is not a calm sideways movement but rather an intense tug-of-war with equal forces.
2. Position determines nature: this is a battle for the 'depression' defense All transactions occur near historically low prices. You can understand it as the market repeatedly testing and confirming the solidity of this 'depression'. Increased transaction volume indicates that real chips are exchanging hands here. The larger the accumulated transaction volume in this area, the stronger the technical significance of this region as a support or resistance level in the future. It is evolving from a simple price point into a 'dense transaction area' with market memory.
My personal perspective and strategic focus👀 For me, the price has not yet escaped the danger zone. The increase in transaction volume is a variable more worthy of attention than a slight rebound, as it indicates that the energy for a change is accumulating, but the direction is uncertain. @Vanarchain
#plasma $XPL You all know that xpl distributed rewards yesterday, right? I received a $200 bonus, sounds pretty good, right? 🙃🙃
Later, I did some calculations. When I made the transaction, I bought in at around $0.14 at the peak price, and then it fell all the way down, recently hovering around $0.08 and $0.09, nearly halving! Initially, there was a $500,000 reward, but now it’s roughly only half left... Given this, do you still think the $200 reward is a lot? Hahaha 😂
However, to be fair, the xpl project team is quite decent. At least, they directly reward the top 500, which is much better than other projects that reward the top 100... that counts as having a conscience...
When you lose, you have to accept it. After all, before this project reward, I was already buying it. Now, I’m just quietly waiting for a rebound opportunity. I believe it can 😌😌@Plasma
After all, Plasma's biggest advantage and highlight lie in the fact that it is not chasing trends, but rather precisely identifying and solving the core pain points in a trillion-dollar market: making stablecoin payments as cheap, simple, and reliable as sending a text message.
It is not another 'big and complete' universal public chain, but a specialized infrastructure optimized from the ground up for the single but massive application scenario of 'stablecoins'.
The 'Rashomon' in the company's meeting room and Vanar Chain's 'meeting minutes' @Gege Wu
Old Chen from the marketing department almost stumbled on a project last quarter. It wasn't a matter of ability; the collaboration was completely chaotic. The company wants to collaborate with a new consumer brand, and the proposal has gone through seventeen iterations. The problem lies in: everyone is making changes in their own way. Some are directly annotating in Feishu documents, some download the PDF and highlight it in different colors to send back via WeChat, some write their suggestions directly in the email body, while others verbally mentioned a few points after an offline meeting, but no one remembered them all. By the night before the final proposal to the partner, Old Chen discovered they had four folders, each claiming to be the 'final version.' Even more critically, the partner sharply asked in the meeting: 'In our last phone call, we clearly requested to modify the third item; why is it still not reflected in the latest version?' Old Chen and the team exchanged glances, and no one could confirm which document corresponded to the 'third item' mentioned in the call. The atmosphere in that meeting dropped to freezing point.
"What exactly is this XPL that has dropped so much?" — In the break room, I explained Plasma to my losing colleague.
Last Friday after the market closed, I ran into my colleague Old Wang in the break room. He was holding a cup of coffee, with a bitter smile, and leaned over to say in a low voice: "I saw you mentioned that XPL before, and I also followed a bit. At this price, the drop makes my scalp tingle... What exactly is this project? Besides knowing that it’s dropping, I don’t understand anything else." Old Wang's confusion is particularly real. He got in around $0.12, with a simple and crude reason: "I've heard several groups talking about it, and it seems quite popular." Now the price has more than halved, and besides opening his wallet every day and sighing, he is completely bewildered about the significance of this project in the real world. His question made me realize that most investors who are bound by the ups and downs are separated from the fundamental value creation of a project by a thick layer of fog. This layer of fog is exactly what the Plasma project is trying to dispel for the entire industry—it does not exist to create another speculative symbol, but to solve a daily pain point that Old Wang experiences every day but has never deeply contemplated: why is it so difficult to complete a simple, cheap, and smooth payment in the crypto world?