The Binance listing game is darker than you think:
Last year I launched
$BLOCK - X's most viral campaign, and my biggest flop to date.
Binance had a part in it. But nobody knows this story:
September 2023, Token2049, Singapore. I met a well known chinese guy .
@DeFianceCapital at an afterparty.
He was super connected, claiming to be close to binance's listing team (not on it, but close enough).
We vibed over the blockgames vision, swapped contacts, kept in touch.
Fast forward to Q1 2024.
$BLOCK is actually working… real stats, real revenue, real attention.
The full package.
I meet him again in London and he lays out the plan:
The Binance spot listing is POSSIBLE.
But here’s the kicker:
He wanted 2% of supply (flexible vesting)
Split between him and someone inside binance's listing team to "push our case through."
Binance was THE meta at the time.
Every project wanted that spot listing.
So i thought fuck it,
if that's what it takes to get
$BLOCK to valhalla, LETS DO IT!
April comes. Group chats start.
Due diligence calls with binance go exactly as he described.
4 stages of DD, we're approaching stage 3.
And then i jump on a call with him. He tells me this:
"We’ll get the spot listing by end of June, maybe July. Additional 5-10% allocation is going to be required, exact fee will be confirmed later.”
Note - none of this is official
But it’s moving. I’m getting terms from someone outside the team.
We would have to wait. Quite a bit.
Then OKX slides into our dms out of nowhere: "listing in 4 days. 0% fee."
Wait, what?
It's April. who the fuck can predict what happens with
$BLOCK and crypto by july?
Maybe that july never comes. maybe the market dies.
maybe we die.
We ditched the Binance guy and took the OKX offer.
This is where the binance story ends.
Reading through the binance listing posts - didn’t hear this twist so far.
But here's what happened to us after:
Once we said yes to OKX…
Bybit, Kucoin, and MEXC all approved us too within 24h - 48h
Suddenly we had 4 days to prepare for a TGE. FOUR DAYS.
No liquidity setup, no market makers lined up, we didn't even know what listing a token actually meant operationally.
(We offered OKX 0.5% ourselves just to incentivize trading volume)
TGE day arrives. We didn't even have OKX account access until 4am that morning.
Not because we're idiots - CEX business accounts are a nightmare to set up even when they're expediting it. documents, compliance, proof of everything.
I'm doing token transactions at 5am, setting up wallets, coordinating transfers.
.@benbaltram dealing with logistics, communications, managing expectations. I was LITERALLY gasping for air.
Market makers finalized their setup literally 8 minutes before the actual TGE time.
Do you think everything was set up properly? You know the answer.
The rest is history… delays in claims, poor liquidity, investors unhappy, users unhappy, airdrop farmers rekt etc.
We learned that CEX listings aren't some magical growth hack.
We learned that insider deals are real, common, and expensive.
And we learned that the market doesn't care about your story when the token goes live and nothing works.
Everything HAS to be flawless..
$BLOCK might have been in a much better place if we weren’t pushed by the CEX and its demands.
Actually, no it wouldn’t.
The airdrop mechanic & tokenomics were absolute dogshit.
We actually explained & onboarded mechanics and details to all of the investors, VCs, advisors ahead of the launch of this campaign.
But even then, nobody would have seen the mistakes until it was obvious. And it got obvious midway.
The only two guys that actually commented, that this will not end well, were .
@gainzy222 & .
@Pentosh1
Anyway, the Binance conversation is still happening across crypto.
Projects are still paying. Insiders are still collecting. The game hasn't changed. If u want an intro to that guy who can make this happen, happy to connect :D
Might not be legal tho 😂
Lesson: WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T I SHORT
$BLOCK LOL????
Leeson nr. 2: we’re launching a prediction app 🙃