With news that Binance is delisting five projects from its platform, could this be the beginning of a minor altcoin purge? The company, run by Changpeng Zhao, has been notoriously liberal with their onboarding of coins.
Some of the coins added have come with supposed listing fees which have been extremely high. The benefits for such companies paying inordinate listing fees outweigh the cost in a bull run, but not so much during a bear market.
Binance has provided the reasons for the delistings. They include a perceived lack of commitment of the teams and a lack of response to Binance’s due diligence, as well as many others. This means that it is unlikely that the current crop of deselected coins were not to know of their impending delisting.
Whilst the industry continues to push on, there are many other coins that have slowed down development or are simply disappearing. There will be many more as well.
The delistings are healthy for the space, though. Slowly but surely, the weeds are being pulled from the territory that they invaded. Whilst this will continue to be a long and painful process for some, the lawn will look much cleaner in many months time.
Sadly, exchanges will probably not go far enough. Many dodgy cryptocurrencies will be allowed to continue unabashed despite their questionable business practices. Binance itself has recently helped with the launch of the BitTorrent token in partnership with Justin Sun of Tron.
Some have argued that this listing was a way to pump both the Binance BNB token as well as Sun’s own Tron token. Questions over Sun’s Tron token go back further. Vitalik Buterin once accused Sun of copy and pasting much of the code used to build Tron.
8. Better white paper writing capability (Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V much higher efficiency than keyboard typing new content)
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 6, 2018
So perhaps more weeds are being allowed to grow in place of the old weeds being ripped up. There is no shortage of new coins at conferences that are yet to be released or have “new and brilliant” ideas. Maybe we will just continue on this rather poor cycle of rubbish being rubbish. What would be better is more delisting and less new coins.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.