Recently, the project is undergoing a brand/mainnet upgrade + token swap, so we have been in contact with major exchanges. From building it in 2017 to today, we are quite familiar with these standard procedures, apart from the corresponding compliance procedures and code audits, the rest are mainly about the marketing budget, how many new users/traffic it can bring, and how to let existing users benefit, etc. The project side needs liquidity and new trading venues; the exchanges need users and trading volume, this is a win-win situation.
The interesting part is that after the simple business communication, it comes to the evaluation by the research department. They raised several points to reject our listing, or that we need to increase the budget due to certain conditions not being met. Let me pick a few interesting ones to talk about.
The first one is that our data and hype are not enough, specifically reflected in the lack of social media data and on-chain data, and then they gave us several examples of projects in the same track. I was puzzled, you are the research department, researching projects every day, can't you see the authenticity of the data? Come on, an account with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, but only a few thousand views on the tweets, and less than 10 comments, can you tell me this is real? And the on-chain data, each transaction hash contains n transaction records, are all the retail users of your project experts who can do their own RPC interface to pack transactions? This is obviously unreasonable, right? Especially for professional AI data labeling, the threshold is high, it's unlikely that a large number of labelers will annotate the same dataset, and the subsequent data verification and cleaning costs are even higher than the labeling itself, so it's even more unlikely, unless you don't care about the cost or your purpose is not really for the data itself.
The second is the endorsement of investment institutions. Nowadays, most projects (except memes) need the backing/support of major VCs to get listed. But as an old project, from FunctionX in 2019 to today's PundiAI, we have been building with our own money for more than 6 years, and from the perspective of us "old-timers", isn't this a good thing? Community-driven, no VC control, and emotionally, this is a very "sentimental" thing. But in the eyes of the research department, this becomes a synonym of no legitimate institutional backing, no hype. I don't know how to explain this...
The third is the token circulation and valuation. From 2019 to now, all the tokens have been fully unlocked, our MC = FDV, with nearly 70% of the tokens locked in the validator nodes. Then the big shots in the research department said that there is huge dump pressure, I was puzzled, not to mention that most of the tokens are in the validator nodes, we have a pure community market, who's going to dump it? Secondly, our token is not new, it has been listed on major exchanges for 6 years, do we need to go to you to dump it? Furthermore, the dump pressure is positively correlated with the market FDV, our market cap and FDV are less than $100M, an AI data layer project with business, products, customers and revenue is only $100M, why don't you go look at those projects with $1B FDV that just launched, their post-launch dump pressure is more worthy of attention, isn't it?!
There are many other points I want to vent, but I won't go into them one by one. I can understand that the research gurus have to look at a lot of projects every day, and they have their own perspectives and data dimensions, and there is a lot of professional knowledge involved, but at least the basic truth and evil should be distinguished, right?
I don't know since when, traffic bribery, data bribery/forgery, project skin-changing (I've even heard of founder skin-changing?), airdropping to studios, and then handing it over to MMs to dump, have become the basic operations for projects to get listed.
Sometimes I feel that getting listed, especially for early tokens, is very similar to venture capital, where you're investing in the team's character. If getting listed is all about these means and operations to the exchanges and VCs, then the future development of these projects is really worrying.
We've been in this circle for so long, we're familiar with these tricks and means, not that we can't do it, but we don't want to. Because in the end, these things will only benefit the studios, the gray industry, and the big players, at the cost of the money of new retail investors, the shift in focus of the builders, and the overall decline of the industry. (P.S.: To be frank, these airdrop tricks are the ones we played with in the past.)
We've seen bull and bear markets and storms, so we know how hard it is to keep our original intention. Sometimes we really miss the fellow founders we met during the 2017/2018 ICO days (many of the bosses we knew back then have already retired), the community was poor but every time we talked about how to improve efficiency/security, how to push to market, when there was a hack everyone rallied to help, it was a win-win development together. Back then, introducing a VC and exchange listing opportunity was free of charge (omitting 10,000 sentences here), and now it's all kinds of rebates/referral fees/management fees.
We really miss those pure old days.
