Binance Alpha has formed a value consensus among project parties, airdrop communities, and retail investors. Project parties are "offering up" to Alpha, airdrop enthusiasts are doing KYC in batches to start a new airdrop journey, while retail investors are navigating profits between point restrictions, lucky tail numbers, and trading wear.

From the initial launch of Alpha as the best exit window for meme coins, to the early "forceful money distribution" of Alpha2.0, and then to introducing a point system to screen users and token issuers queuing to launch on Alpha, Binance has gradually reclaimed traffic and pricing power in the on-chain market. Behind all this is Binance's ambition to reorganize the ecosystem through liquidity discourse after being left behind by OKX on the product side.

After 150 days, Binance Alpha has evolved from a wallet function to the most authoritative structural mechanism in the entire crypto market.

What has Alpha done in 5 months?

In 2024, the crypto market ushered in a bull market boom under the dual stimulation of Bitcoin spot ETF approval and meme craze. However, beneath the appearance of liquidity recovery, a deeper issue is that the pricing mechanism between primary and secondary markets is gradually failing. VC project valuations are inflated, project token issuance cycles are repeatedly extended, user participation thresholds continue to rise, and the final listing window often becomes an endpoint for project parties and early investors to cash out, leaving retail investors with nothing.

It was against this background that Binance launched Binance Alpha on December 17, 2024. Initially, it was just an experimental feature in the Binance Web3 wallet for discovering quality projects, but it quickly evolved into Binance's core tool for reconstructing pricing power in the on-chain market.

Binance co-founder He Yi admitted in a Space responding to community disputes that Binance's token listing has the problem of "peak at opening" and frankly acknowledged that the traditional token listing mechanism is difficult to continue under current scale and regulatory constraints. Binance had previously attempted voting listings, Dutch auctions, and other mechanisms to constrain new token price performance, but the results were always unsatisfactory.

Thus, Alpha token listing became a strategic alternative within Binance's controllable range.

"Put these projects with market hotspots in Binance Alpha. Projects entering the observation area are not guaranteed to be listed on Binance. A project can only have income and profit when it is beneficial to society, and then possibly share returns with users," He Yi made such a promise in the Space.

On December 18, Binance Alpha announced its first batch of projects. Until February 13, Binance Alpha had launched over 80 tokens from BSC, Solana, Base, and other ecosystems, mainly meme and AI tokens. However, the market did not reduce the criticism of VC tokens dropping immediately as Binance expected, and being listed on Alpha instead became the last stop for meme coin expectations.

It wasn't until early February 2025 that the BSC ecosystem, starting from the test token TST, opened the channel between Alpha and traffic. From that period, Alpha began listing non-meme tokens such as ONDO, MORPHO, and AERO.

In March, due to OKX DEX's closure, Binance wallet launched Binance Alpha2.0, directly integrating Binance Alpha into the CEX, allowing users to trade Alpha tokens directly with in-platform funds. As a result, Binance wallet's trading volume and active users suddenly surpassed others, occupying 80% of wallet trading volume, becoming the steepest growth curve in wallet products.

Meanwhile, Binance's screening standards for Alpha users have continuously evolved. The initial "task point system" was no longer sufficient to form effective differentiation. The platform quickly introduced lucky tail numbers and point consumption systems to stimulate more frequent interaction behaviors. This mechanism balances user participation continuity and differentiation while providing project parties with relatively precise airdrop target groups.

After Going Live on Alpha

Binance Alpha's core listing indicator is based on how many tokens it can provide, which aligns with the concept of "embracing the Binance ecosystem and BNB Chain".

According to crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong's statistics, Puffer went live on Alpha seven months after token issuance. Based on on-chain data, the project mapped approximately 3.16% of its tokens to the BNB Chain, with 1.24% directly allocated to the Alpha user airdrop pool, and also injected nearly 500,000 USDC in liquidity into PancakeSwap. Comprehensive estimates suggest that Puffer's total cost for this Alpha airdrop is close to $3 million.

As AB said, "The cost is not small, but the benefits are obvious", directly obtaining a Binance CEX trading channel through the Alpha feature, and completing liquidity pre-heating and market awareness before listing on futures or the main platform.

A similar path can be seen in the ZK track's star project Polyhedra, whose token ZKJ entered Alpha without being listed on the Binance main platform, becoming the first top 100 market cap token included in this mechanism. The project team launched up to 150% staking rewards and point competitions to support token price, attracting users to generate trading behavior and accumulate wallet activity. Strategically, the project team may want to leverage Alpha's internal indicators to accumulate influence and ultimately drive Binance's listing decision.

Facing industry challenges such as airdrop farming and distorted trading data, Binance does not attempt to eliminate these behaviors, but instead builds a mechanism that allows projects to first prove their attractiveness and then observe whether they can form a stable user base and real trading depth. The boundary between farming and genuine behavior is postponed and quantified in Alpha's point system.

However, from another perspective, Binance Alpha has only successfully attracted users seeking free benefits, and has not attracted real trading volume. Users still would not choose Binance wallet as their first choice when selecting on-chain behaviors.

The past cycle was to some extent "to VC", relying on storytelling to raise funds, while now it is "to liquidity", and Alpha is Binance's anchor for re-establishing liquidity dominance. In an era where VCs are no longer reliable, communities have been lost, and product competition has fallen into homogenization, Binance Alpha may not be the optimal solution for innovation, but it is the most effective method for absorbing bubbles.