The Rise of Binance Alpha: From Meme Coin Exit Window to the Most Influential Structural Mechanism in the Crypto Market

Binance Alpha has formed a consensus on value among project parties, coin-collecting circles, retail investors and other circles.

Author:Kaori

Binance Alpha has formed a consensus on value among project parties, coin-collecting circles, retail investors and other circles. Projects "pay" to Alpha, and coin-collecting parties do KYC in batches to start a new round of coin-collecting journey, while retail investors make profits by manipulating point limits, lucky tail numbers and transaction wear and tear.

From the very beginning, Alpha was the best exit window for meme coins, to the first few rounds of "violent money giveaways" in Alpha2.0, to the introduction of a points system to screen users and token issuers to line up for Alpha, Binance has gradually regained the traffic and pricing power of the on-chain market. Behind all this is Binance's ambition to reorganize the ecosystem through liquidity discourse power on the asset side after being left behind by OKX on the product side.

150 days have passed, and Binance Alpha has evolved from a wallet function into the most influential structural mechanism in the entire crypto market.

What has Alpha done in these 5 months?

In 2024, the crypto market ushered in a bull market boom under the dual stimulation of the approval of Bitcoin spot ETF and the meme craze. However, under the appearance of liquidity recovery, a deeper problem is that the pricing mechanism between the primary market and the secondary market is gradually failing. VC project valuations are inflated, the project issuance cycle is repeatedly extended, the user participation threshold is constantly raised, and the final listing window often becomes the end point for the project party and early investors to collectively cash out, leaving retail investors with only a mess.

It is in this context that Binance launched Binance Alpha on December 17, 2024. At first, it was just an experimental function in the Binance Web3 wallet for discovering high-quality projects, but it quickly evolved into Binance's core tool for reconstructing pricing power in the on-chain market.

In a Space post responding to community disputes, Binance co-founder He Yi admitted that Binance's listing of coins had the problem of "peaking at the opening", and frankly stated that the traditional listing mechanism is no longer sustainable under the current volume and regulatory constraints. Binance has also used mechanisms such as voting for listing and Dutch auctions to constrain the price performance of new coins after listing, but the results have always been unsatisfactory.

Therefore, Alpha listing became a strategic alternative within the controllable range of Binance at that stage.

"Put these hot projects in the market in Binance Alpha. Projects in the observation area are not guaranteed to be listed on Binance. A project can only generate income and profits, and only then can it share the benefits with users, if it is beneficial to society." He Yi made such a promise in Space.

On December 18, Binance Alpha announced the first batch of project lists. As of February 13, Binance Alpha has launched more than 80 tokens from ecosystems such as BSC, Solana, and Base, mainly meme and AI tokens. However, the market did not reduce the criticism of VC coins that fell at the opening as Binance expected, and the launch of Alpha became the expected last stop for meme coins.

It was not until early February 2025 that the BSC ecosystem opened up the channel between Alpha and traffic, starting with the test coin TST. It was also from that period that Alpha began to launch non-meme tokens, such as ONDO, MORPHO, AERO, etc.

In March, due to the closure of OKX DEX, Binance Wallet launched Binance Alpha 2.0 at this time. By integrating Binance Alpha directly into CEX, users can directly use funds in the exchange to trade Alpha tokens. As a result, Binance Wallet's trading volume and active users surpassed in one fell swoop, accounting for 80% of the trading volume of crypto wallets, becoming the steepest part of the growth curve of wallet products.

At the same time, Binance's screening criteria for Alpha users are also constantly evolving. Since the initial "task-based points system" is no longer sufficient to form an effective distinction, the platform quickly introduced systems such as lucky tail numbers and points consumption to stimulate more frequent interactions. This mechanism takes into account the continuity and differentiation of user participation, and also provides project parties with a relatively accurate airdrop target group.

The project party is no longer hesitant

Since the launch of the Alpha mechanism, the choices facing project owners have changed.

Faced with the high uncertainty of the main site listing window, the cashing pressure of the on-chain community, and the inverted valuation on VC books, more and more teams are beginning to realize that if they want to gain market attention and liquidity support, it may not be enough to just tell stories, maintain the community, or wait for the traditional listing process.

Rather than continuing to waste time on a route where the results cannot be measured, it is better to actively adapt to the new paradigm brought by Alpha