Is the fee for listing coins reasonable? Base sparks a controversy over Binance's coin listing fees.

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

On October 11, Base founder Jesse Pollak posted multiple messages on X, criticizing certain centralized exchanges for charging project teams 2% to 9% of the token supply as listing fees.

This post received over a million views, and Zerebro founder Jeffy Yu retweeted, stating, “When we were building Zerebro, Binance asked for a listing fee of $1 million, Bybit took a large amount of tokens and $250,000, and accused market maker Wintermute of demanding 10% of the token supply (100,000,000 tokens), and then selling them off for profit afterward.”

Although Binance's official response later confirmed that there are no relevant materials about Zerebro after checking with the listing team, it is possible that Jeffy fell victim to a scam. However, Jesse's comments have continued to fuel the topic of listing fees for centralized exchanges within the community, and many industry insiders have revealed that some centralized exchanges charge unreasonable listing fees.

Discrepancies in Listing Strategies Between the East and West: Why Did Jesse Initiate a Protest?

Web3 independent researcher Haotian stated that listing fees are just a guise; listing fees serve as a quality screening mechanism, which is logically sound. CEX provides traffic and exit channels, and market makers provide liquidity support, making it reasonable to collect listing fees.

“But what Jesse is really anxious about is not the 9%, but the whole set of “building the platform” + “exit mechanism” combo constructed by that mysterious Eastern power.”

The “Alpha Observation Zone” mechanism launched by Binance provides a fast-track channel for many small projects to list their tokens. As long as a project has a certain level of popularity, it can quickly enter this observation zone to gain traffic. Users earn Alpha points by participating, and in return, they receive a certain proportion of airdrop incentives, effectively taking on part of the market maker's risk.

After the project party launched the contract trading, they were able to hedge through shorting contracts, achieving quick withdrawal and exit. The entire process formed a highly interconnected loop of rapid price increases and hedged exits, which seemingly became the “optimal strategy” for many projects.

“To some extent, Binance's monopoly is not just about attention and liquidity, but about changing the entire industry's rules of the game, where 'quick exits' replace 'long-term building.' This is the core of Jesse's real anxiety.”

Users rush to earn points, project parties rush to cash out, incentive design for “quick in and out”

Jesse has repeatedly emphasized slogans such as “permissionless token launches” and “nurturing long-term holders,” hoping to leverage a decentralized market mechanism to allow developers to co-manage projects with the community from day one, rather than viewing exchanges as a short-term exit.

Senior secondary analyst @JunShao_666 believes that what really upset Jesse was that his piece of the cake couldn't be held anymore, and that this mechanism is quietly rewriting the “value magnet” of Crypto.

According to historical data from DeFiLlama, over 70% of the TVL of projects launched on Binance Alpha was cut in half within three months. The incentive design favors “quick in and out”: users earn points to exchange for airdrops, while project teams hedge and cash out.

The development path of Base and Coinbase is “on-chain cold start”. Projects are first launched on DEXs without permission, establishing a real and closely bound holder community, and then distributed on centralized exchanges. It is this Day 1 rooted philosophy that allows Base's TVL to soar from zero to over $10 billion during the 2024-25 cycle.

However, Binance's fast-track mechanism has left project parties wondering why they should slowly cultivate on Base when they could go directly to Binance, pump the price in a month, and cash out.

Jesse believes that their platform has invested a lot of resources to build an advanced infrastructure, such as flashblocks that improve trading efficiency and transparency, as well as deep integration with DEX, with the aim of providing project parties with a fair, open, and efficient on-chain development environment.

However, at present, these infrastructures are facing the risk of being “free-ridden” by other centralized exchanges that primarily operate on a model of quick exit and high listing fees.