cataction

The Binance Trojan Horse: More recently, Binance has been heavily diversifying in hopes of maintaining control and expanding its web of influence Communities often put too much pressure on projects to force listings on certain venues. Every project knows that visibility is key and one of those venues is CoinMarketCap, which used to be an independent company but is now owned by Binance. In order to maintain control over the space, you must own consumer-facing apps. Binance knows this - which is why it has invested heavily in consumer-facing businesses and implemented its “Binance Business Model” across them. They frame the costs as “Priority Fees” or “Marketing Fees” and proceed to charge fortunes for basic services. Since its acquisition, CoinMarketCap has been operating under the same business model as Binance - charging exchanges $50,000 for what they call a “Priority Fee” due to “backlog.” Because... well, CoinMarketCap is Binance. Decentralized exchanges that want visibility on CoinMarketCap are forced to absorb the cost. Pay $50,000 and you get listed. It didn’t use to be like this - but this is Binance’s way of maintaining control. Personally, I recommend boycotting CMC altogether and switching to better alternatives such as CoinGecko. What about Binance themselves? Well Their exchange takes approximately 9% to 11% in the form of tokens that comes back as sell pressure on retail and is framed as "Marketing Fee". This is the very same business model they run through and through. The conversation usually goes as follows: "We will list you for free - just fill in the form". Once the project fills the form where they give out general information about themselves, the team, the project... they are then told that the free listing looks as follows: 1) 2% total supply 2) 3% total supply reserved for future airdrops to be distributed to Binance web3wallet users 3) 1% total supply for web3wallet marketing 4) Hundreds of thousands in USDC/USDT 5) 3% total supply reserved for BNB HODLer programme 6) $200K worth of your tokens based on your last valuation reserved for Binance affiliate marketing 7) $2M worth of BNB for security deposit They also force you to list on PancakeSwap as part of their "Binance Alpha". Why Pancake Swap? Because this venue - is also owned by them. Whats more interesting is the fact that they frame this ask as "an assurance of interest". If you do large volumes and prove to be an interesting token - they will consider you to be listed. But why do they do that? To make preparations for their final "Max extract". You see - Pancake swap charges 33% of everything that liquidity providers make. The idea is that they put immense pressure on projects to perform , forcing projects to throw money and generate volumes.. Subsequently Binance extracts 33% of fees on this volume, It gets listed on Binance SPOT - they proceed to dump the tokens framed as "Marketing Cost" and on top of all of that they tell projects that if they fall beneath a certain price point - all of their security deposits will be confiscated. And all of this is just a small taste of how they run business. A large chunck of the industry is being mislead into one big max extraction machine that is Binance and its cartel. To be honest I have big respect for a lot of the venues that exist on Solana. Kamino, Jupiter, Meteora, DefiTuna, Raydium , Orca... They are far better venues to support and build on top of. It is the responsibility of projects and communities alike to put their funds and support venues that uphold to the highest standard and grow the this ecosystem to the right direction. TLDR : don't put pressure on projects to get listed on venues that max extract. We are responsible for driving this thing. Do your due diligence. Support the right people for the right reasons! Solana!