The failure of Binance Alpha1.0 and the strategic shift to Alpha2.0

Due to the failure on Binance Wallet, Binance Alpha 1.0, which was the bridge for Binance to connect on-chain liquidity, failed.

Author: Kevin, the Researcher at Movemaker

The failure of Binance Alpha1.0 and the strategic shift to Alpha2.0

Due to the failure on Binance Wallet, Binance Alpha 1.0, which was the bridge for Binance to connect on-chain liquidity, failed. The trading volume and number of users before the upgrade fell to a record low. The total daily trading volume of all tokens on Alpha was less than 10 million US dollars, and the number of daily transactions was less than 10,000 times, which was undoubtedly a huge gap compared with the volume of Binance Exchange. Not only did it fail to attract on-chain users and corresponding liquidity to the exchange, but it also had a negative impact on marketing.

Therefore, Binance Alpha was upgraded to Binance Alpha 2.0 at the end of March. Alpha was directly integrated into the Binance APP. Unlike 1.0, which could only be accessed through the Binance Web3 wallet, after the upgrade, users can use the funds in the exchange to purchase Alpha tokens.

Failure to expand the scale of wallet users means that Binance's strategy of competing for on-chain liquidity through Binance Alpha as a bridge will not work, and it cannot attract liquidity while enhancing BSC's attention. In other words, when Binance's growth on the chain cannot form a natural positive cycle, it can only do the opposite, by injecting the flow in the exchange back into Alpha, so that Binance Alpha can achieve quantitative changes to attract market attention, complete qualitative changes under sufficient wealth effects, and completely become Binance's outpost for attracting on-chain liquidity, amplifying the presence of the BSC chain.

Waiting period without consensus confirmation: Alpha2.0’s low point before the “gunshot”

This idea is reasonable, but it needs a major premise to work, that is, in a market with insufficient liquidity, to provide a consensus for the waiting funds to end, so as to trigger the market attention of Binance Alpha2.0. Without such a trigger, even if Alpha is upgraded to 2.0, from the data from the end of March to mid-April, whether it is the presentation of the order depth or the publicity of the wealth effect, it can only stimulate the market discussion heat within a short window of less than a week, and soon return to silence, and fall into a trough again in early April.

Of course, this is not a failure of the Alpha2.0 upgrade or a strategic error, because in order to expand the scale of Alpha, that is, the total trading volume of Alpha, in addition to introducing liquidity from DEX, the only way is to inject liquidity from Binance's own exchange. The reason why 1.0 chose the former solution is that, on the one hand, this is a ready-made strategy of second-tier exchanges, and the market can quickly accept Binance's move; on the other hand, Binance's absolute confidence as a leading exchange is different from the starting point of second-tier exchanges. The latter regards the introduction of on-chain liquidity as the foundation or foundation, so they can achieve agile response in user experience or marketing response, while Binance's introduction of on-chain liquidity is more of a rainy day, not an urgent matter. Therefore, the poor experience of Binance Wallet and the sharp downturn in the market trend in Q1 made it difficult for Binance to quickly turn around and adjust, resulting in the collapse of Alpha1.0.

Therefore, it can be said that reverse injection of liquidity from exchanges is Binance's last resort and also the most powerful upgrade. However, judging from the Alpha2.0 data from March 20 to April 20, it can still be described as bleak. Why? Because even if the pipeline or path for injecting liquidity has been successfully built, the influx of liquidity still requires a signal, a gunshot. In the current desperate atmosphere of the crypto market where all narratives have been shattered, only Bitcoin can play the role of such a starting gun.

Bitcoin signal is activated, Alpha2.0 trading ecology ushered in a turning point

The price of Bitcoin is closely linked to the macroeconomic trend of the United States. For Bitcoin to develop a new market, it also needs the support of macro market confidence. In the previous article, Bitcoin has been hovering around 85,000 for a week, waiting for macro confidence confirmation. Therefore, when the market is deeply trapped in the fear of the double punch of tariffs and recession, and stimulated by the 90-day tariff cooling-off period, the strong performance of the US economy, and the good news of progress in Sino-US negotiations, a short market easing cycle appears. At present, there is no need to consider the risk of further deterioration of tariffs, and the risk aversion caused by recession can also be ignored. In the next