The current version of the voting mechanism may be the latest solution provided by Binance to address the challenge of screening 13 million tokens.
Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
On March 20, 2025, the world's largest crypto exchange Binance launched the "Vote to List" voting activity to list tokens, partially handing over the token listing decision-making power to the community. This crypto democracy experiment involving millions of users has attracted widespread industry attention, while also sparking in-depth discussions on the boundaries of community autonomy, market manipulation risks, and the feasibility of decentralized governance.
From Centralized Review to Community Co-governance
According to the official announcement from Binance, the first round of voting will last until March 27, and users need to hold at least 0.01 BNB (about $6.2) to participate, with each user able to vote for up to 5 BNB Smart Chain ecosystem tokens. The initial candidate list includes 9 projects: BANANAS31 (Banana For Scale), BID (CreatorBid), Broccoli (Broccoli), Broccoli (CZ'S Dog), KOMA (Koma Inu), SIREN (SIREN), mubarak (mubarak), TUT (Tutorial), and WHY (why). The top two projects selected will enter Binance's professional due diligence process.
Regarding the vote-buying behavior in Binance's token listing voting activity, Binance co-founder He Yi commented that they will use anti-vote-buying measures to ensure fair voting.
Noteworthy is the dual-balance mechanism in the rule design:
- Participation threshold and anti-vote-buying measures: The low 0.01 BNB threshold ensures broad participation, coupled with "vote-buying" filtering technology to eliminate fake accounts, maintaining openness while preventing manipulation.
- Connecting community will and professional review: The voting results do not directly determine the listing, as they still need to go through the traditional due diligence process for compliance and security.
- Ecosystem-focused strategy: The initial phase is limited to BNB Chain tokens, strengthening ecosystem cohesion while reducing the complexity of evaluating multi-chain projects.
This "democratic screening + professional gatekeeping" hybrid model has been evaluated by Cointelegraph analysts as "finding a compromise between the ideal of decentralization and the reality of centralization".
Community Dynamics: Enthusiastic Support and Undercurrents
Within 24 hours of the activity launch, the related topic was strongly discussed on X. Most users welcomed the delegation of participation rights, reflecting the market's desire for open governance. But there are hidden agendas beneath the surface:
An arms race between tokens: Multiple project communities have promised token airdrops and other rewards to attract holders to vote; Extensive short discussions: Since the activity will only list a few tokens, the prices of the unselected tokens may drop, and some have proposed shorting all the participating tokens to profit.
Interestingly, Binance has recently listed multiple contract trading pairs, and all the candidate tokens in this voting are already listed on Binance's contract trading - "being bearish and shorting" is not just talk.
This frenetic voting atmosphere inevitably reminds one of the explosive scenes during Binance's first token listing vote in 2017. CZ responded to users' comments about the "effective voting mechanism implemented by Binance in 2017", saying, "The voting was good at first. But later it tended to split the community, causing the project teams to attack each other. It felt like PVP. Preventing cheating also became increasingly difficult over time. We need to keep changing the new model. Occasionally, it's still possible to do it."
Mechanism Evolution: The Iterative Path of Eight Years of Voting History
Reviewing the development of Binance's token listing mechanism is undoubtedly a history of constantly seeking a dynamic balance between centralization and decentralization. In the startup period from 2017 to 2019, Binance relied entirely on the internal team to review projects, and while the voting mechanism sparked a wave of enthusiasm, it also brought about chaos such as vote-buying and bribery.
From 2020 to 2024, the adjustment period, Binance temporarily shelved the voting mechanism and turned to more controllable models like Launchpad and Launchpool for project listings, and also established an Alpha project library for long-term observation. In 2025, Binance relaunched the voting activity with a brand-new approach, introducing token holding thresholds, vote-buying algorithms, and limiting the voting scope to a pre-reviewed project pool, while still retaining the final veto power of professional due diligence.
Through token-based verification and strict rule design, Binance is trying to build a healthier and more sustainable governance ecosystem.
Future Projection: Three Possible Paths for the Autonomy Experiment
Looking ahead, this autonomy experiment may evolve in three vastly different directions. In the best-case scenario, community consensus can help high-quality projects stand out, and the anti-cheating system can effectively purify the voting environment, forming a replicable governance template.
In the less than ideal situation, market manipulation by whales may lead to the "bad money driving out good", and the strategy of shorting all participating tokens may trigger a collapse of small and medium-sized tokens.
The compromised reality may be: some dark horse projects are selected, and intermittent vote-buying scandals force the platform to continuously optimize the rule design.
CoinMarketCap currently shows that the total number of cryptocurrencies exceeds 13 million.
Behind the token listing vote is Binance's latest attempt at traffic acquisition after overcoming regulatory hurdles. Within the vast crypto empire, the super traffic closed loop formed by the exchange + wallet + public chain + community + KOL is taking shape, and the crypto storm it can stir up remains to be seen.
