Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher
On October 11, Base founder Jesse Pollak posted a series of posts on X, criticizing some centralized exchanges for charging project parties 2% to 9% of the token supply as listing fees. The post received over one million views, and Zerebro founder Jeffy Yu retweeted it, saying, “When we were building Zerebro, Binance demanded a $1 million listing fee. Bybit took a large amount of tokens and $250,000, and accused the market maker Wintermute of demanding 10% of the token supply (100,000,000 tokens) and then selling them for profit.” Although Binance later responded that after checking with the listing team, there was no relevant information about Zerebro, Jeffy may have been scammed. However, Jesse's remarks have also fueled the debate about centralized exchange listing fees within the community, with many industry insiders alleging that some centralized exchanges charge unreasonable fees. East and West diverge on listing strategies: Why is Jesse protesting? Independent Web3 researcher Haotian, however, argues that listing fees are merely a cover. As a quality screening mechanism, they are logically justifiable. CEXs provide traffic and exit channels, while market makers provide liquidity. Charging listing fees is justified. "But Jesse's real anxiety isn't about that 9%; it's about the entire "stage-building" and "exit mechanism" combination being constructed by that mysterious Eastern power." Binance's "Alpha Observation Zone" provides a fast track for listing for many small projects. As long as a project has a certain level of popularity, it can quickly enter this observation zone and gain traffic. Users earn Alpha Points and, in return, receive a percentage of airdrop incentives, effectively shouldering some of the market maker's risk. After launching contract trading, project owners can hedge by shorting the contracts, achieving a quick divestment and exit. This entire process forms a highly interconnected cycle of rapid market mobilization and hedged exit, seemingly becoming the "optimal strategy" for many projects.
"To some extent, Binance's monopoly is not just about attention and liquidity, but is changing the rules of the game for the entire industry, replacing "long-term construction" with "quick exit." This is the core of Jesse's real anxiety."
Users are eager to brush up points, project parties are eager to cash out, and the incentive design is "quick in and quick out"
Jesse has repeatedly emphasized slogans such as "permissionless token launch" and "continuous cultivation of long-term holders" in the past, hoping that through decentralized market mechanisms, developers can jointly operate projects with the community from day one, rather than viewing exchanges as short-term exits. Senior secondary analyst @JunShao_666 believes that what really pissed Jesse off was that his piece of the pie was being affected, and he couldn't sit still. This mechanism is quietly rewriting the "value magnetism" of Crypto. According to historical data from DeFiLlama, over 70% of projects listed on Binance Alpha saw their TVL halved within three months. The incentive design favors a "quick in, quick out" model: users earn points for airdrops, while projects hedge and cash out. Base and Coinbase's development path is an "on-chain cold start," where projects first list unlicensed on DEXs to establish a real and closely-knit group of holders before distributing their tokens on centralized exchanges. It's this Day 1, rooted approach that propelled Base's TVL from zero to over $10 billion during the 2024-25 cycle. However, Binance's fast-track approach has left project developers wondering why they should slowly cultivate Base when they could simply list on Binance and then cash out within a month. Jesse believes the platform has invested significant resources in building advanced infrastructure, such as Flashblocks, which improves transaction efficiency and transparency, and deep integration with decentralized exchanges (DEXs). This is all about providing projects with a fair, open, and efficient on-chain development environment.
However, at present, these infrastructures are facing the risk of being "free-ridden" by other centralized exchanges that mainly rely on quick exits and high listing fees.
Joy
