Original: " Where did the rumors of Binance's girlfriends section come from?" "
Author: Jaleel
After Binance launched the 29th Launchpad project Hooked Protocol (HOOK) in November last year, there has been no IEO for nearly 4 months. However, what is surprising is that in the past two months, Binance has suddenly connected to two IEOs of Space ID (ID) and Open Campus (EDU).
Binance has never had a phenomenal IEO since GMT . Different from the celebration status of the Launchpad community in the past, the negative voices of these IEOs have continued.
Especially the launch of Hooked Protocol (HOOK) and Open Campus (EDU).... The voice of criticism from the community and KOL has intensified. It's girlfriend coins again", "girlfriend plate +1".
Where did the rumors of Binance’s “Girlfriends Section” come from? What happened to the so-called "Girlfriend Coin"? Let's start with He Yi who regained control of Binance Labs.
In August 2022, He Yi was appointed as the head of Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubation arm of Binance. Binance Labs is the largest encrypted asset venture capital institution in the industry with assets under management. Its fund investment income is as high as 21 times, which is second to none in the industry. Binance Labs manages assets totaling $7.5 billion and has invested in more than 200 projects.
Amid the high expectations, He Yi posted on the social media platform, "Thank you for your enthusiasm for Launchpad and Launchpool. Binance is committed to meeting the needs of the community. Now we have started to find high-quality projects for users."
As we have seen, He Yi often expresses support for women. With her insistence, Binance has also added a new women's section to share the achievements and stories of women in the industry.
HOOK controversy
Going back to the end of last year, Hooked Protocol caused quite a bit of controversy when it was first launched. This Hooked Protocol IEO has been nearly 8 months since the last GMT , and it is also He Yi's first IEO project after taking charge of Binance Labs. But the launch of Hooked Protocol was very hasty, and the community didn't seem to buy it.
KOLdefi3w’s views on Hooked Protocol are very representative in the community: From the time point of view, the project is launched in a hurry, Hooked’s official website smells like a copycat demo (it has a PancakeSwap IFO flavor), and the only available product Wild Cash is said to be Web3 , but there is a strong smell of Web2, the login is through the mailbox instead of the wallet, and the generated wallet cannot export the private key, in short, it reveals a strange smell.
He believes that if it were not for these two financing companies to lead the investment, it is estimated that most people would not be interested in such a project. After all, apart from the capital, such a project would not have any special features.
While the community was looking for the special features of the Hooked Protocol, some community members saw from LinkedIn that the team members of the Hooked Protocol came from Midu, the text-based growth platform under the China Literature Group. CEO Jason Y (Yang Ji) worked for Uber and Facebook, and developed Hooked Protocol just after leaving Midu in April.
However, it is worth noting that after the news of Hooked’s IEO came out, the community broke the news that Yang Ji, the project CEO, seemed to have a close relationship with Primitive Capital Dovey Wan, and at the same time, Dovey Wan was also an investor in the agreement.
Faced with such revelations and rumors, Dovey Wan denied being married with ironic words: "Didn't you say that I was divorced a few days ago? Why am I married again? Am I married or divorced? Please give me a letter."
In the absence of direct evidence, the community pointed out that the "friendly girlfriend relationship" between Dovey and He Yi was the reason why Hooked Protocol was listed on Binance. This is how the rumors of "Girlfriend Coin" began.
"HOOK2.0" - EDU
Let's take a look at EDU, which is called HOOK2.0. EDU is the token of the IEO project Open Campus.
The community found that the partners of Binance's new IEO project Open Campus are highly overlapped with Hooked Protocol. Among its partners, Hooked Protocol and Mocaverse and Sanbox of the Animocoa series are its partners.
EDU and HOOK are both educational tokens, so they are called "HOOK2.0" by many users.
Perhaps the biggest reason why EDU has been criticized and slandered is that the community discovered that the Twitter of Open Campus was registered in March, and the domain name was purchased on March 18, and it was only purchased for one year. Discord was created in April, and team members remain anonymous and undisclosed. The official website is relatively sloppy, and the Whitepaper has not yet been released. EDU's IEO accounts for 5%, and the remaining 95% is owned by the project party. Such a hasty project can be listed on Binance, which makes people wonder why.
Source: Community
The high degree of overlap of partners, and the fact that Hooked Protocol itself has the concept of "girlfriend coins", it seems that Open Campus can't get rid of the community's reverie about "girlfriends".
Response from the Binance and Open Campus teams
Under the growing criticism and doubts, Binance and Open Campus also had to respond.
Binance employees (@sisibinance) were the first to clarify on social media that "the boss said before that education will be the focus of this year", denying that the so-called "girlfriend relationship" is related to the project's launch on Binance.
At 9:30 that night, He Yi also issued an article denying the existence of Binance's girlfriends sector coin. Then, 3 days later, Open Campus announced the team members of the project through official channels, filling in the vacancy that the community questioned the team's anonymity.
The list of EDU council members released by the Open Campus team includes some notable names including Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, Yogev Shelly, founder and CEO of TinyTap, Jay Varkey, executive director and board member of GEMS Education, Jack, former chairman of the KIPP Foundation Chorowasky, Yida Gao, founder of Shima Capital.
Among them, TinyTap claims to have the world's largest game library made by educators, targeting children aged 2 to 8. It was established in 2012 and currently has 30 employees. The relationship between TinyTap and Open Campus is like that between Uniswap Labs and Uniswap Protocol. Open Campus is a community-owned underlying protocol for Web3 education, and TinyTap is an educational project using this protocol.
In a recent Twitter Space on April 26, Animoca Chief Commercial Officer Alan Lau also responded to questions from the community. Alan Lau said that Open Campus did not issue tokens in the name of TinyTap because the project hopes to cover educational services for all ages, not just for children's education, so it chose to establish a new Foundation. The team hopes to develop a larger market, and does not want users to feel that they are just educating children.
At the same time, he admitted that the communication in the early stage was indeed not in place, but many things of Open Campus will be announced one after another. Recently, all aspects of Open Campus information have been supplemented in response to community queries, and there is not only one TinyTap project based on Open Campus. In the future, more than 400 projects under Animoca will explore the field of education based on Open Campus.
In a previous interview, in the face of "Open Campus official push and official website content is too simple and sloppy, is it a new project of "shell"? "When in doubt, Yogev Shelly, the founder of Open Campus, also responded: "We must keep it as simple as possible at the beginning, because from a legal point of view, we don't want to announce anything about Token, and we want to keep it as accurate as possible, so we initially launched The Open Campus official website is a very streamlined website.”
At the same time, Yogev Shelly also said that now that Binance Launchpad has announced news about Token, more information including detailed charts will be released soon, including a complete Whitepaper.
Perhaps the response from Binance and Open Campus has had an effect, and the community has changed the subject of this IEO: Binance has always been more optimistic about the education sector before. It's just that this wave of IEO seems a little sloppy, giving people a feeling of relationship. Some KOLs also said that it doesn't matter if a girlfriend is a girlfriend or not, "The most important thing is to pull the market!"
At the beginning of this year, CZ announced the three key directions of Binance's 2023 planning, the first of which is education, followed by compliance and product services. The trading platform is the biggest beneficiary of the growth of industry traffic, so Binance is also the one that most urgently hopes that more people will enter the Web3 industry. The education sector is a good entrance, which can lower the threshold for users to enter Web3.
Because CZ and Binance did mention before that this year's key investment direction is education. Therefore, many people in the community believe that with Binance’s current market status and wealth, it is not enough to use this method to seek benefits for themselves, but it is inevitable that people around them and employees with certain rights will organize a special bureau to do what they like.
Binance also seems to have noticed the problem. When participating in the online chat of "POW'ER 2023 Hong Kong Web3 Innovators Summit", He Yi said that "Binance is very strict in internal control. No matter how senior employees are in Binance, they are not allowed to speculate in coins. After buying, they must Hold 90+ days to trade".
Although there are suspicions about the girlfriend sector, overall, these education sector projects are indeed in line with Binance’s current strategic line. Whether the education sector will play a role in the market in the future, and whether the Hooked Protocol and Open Campus can really be implemented in Web3 will take time to test.
Scolding is scolding, buying is buying
In the midst of scolding and singing empty voices, some people also pointed out that "I saw that everyone is singing empty girlfriends, but although there are a bunch of empty singing now, as long as they are online, they will all run after them. After all, pulling is the most important thing. justice."
Professor KOL Shuo said: "Don't care about the mouse warehouse or the boudoir section, it doesn't matter. After Binance announced the IEO, it directly supported the market. At least it proved that Binance wanted the market. OK."
In addition, he also believes that EDU will directly benefit the three companies, HOOK, Binance and HIGH are all investors.
Indeed, scolding is scolding, and buying is buying.
From many previous projects, we have been able to find that doubts from the community do not affect most people's pursuit of it. Whether or not the Binance "girlfriends section" really exists, BlockBeats cannot give a definite answer until there is real and direct evidence.
But behind such ambiguous and vague rumors, the question reflected is real: What are the criteria for Binance’s IEO project selection and screening? Is there a complete and convincing system? Has such a standard been artificially lowered in front of relationships?
Throughout the history of Binance Launchpad , many phenomenal IEOs have been launched. The most famous Polygon, Matic soared from the highest price of 0.00263 US dollars to 2.71 US dollars, an increase of 1000 times. Not to mention Sandbox, Axie, and STEPN, which can even lead a single track and have epoch-making significance.
It is also these high-quality IEO projects that help Binance become a reputable and mature platform to a certain extent. Users choose to trust these projects that have been reviewed and approved by Binance. In contrast, today's IEO project team is new, less well-known, and has a short schedule, which is unacceptable to the community.
Of course, we can also understand that the market conditions have not been optimistic for a long time in the past, and Binance, as the industry leader, shoulders greater responsibilities and is more likely to be followed and discussed by users.
