The Evolution of Listing Cycles: Yesterday's Wind Won't Fly Today's Kite
The article "The Evolution of Listing Cycle: Yesterday's Wind Can't Fly Today's Kite" uses a dental braces metaphor to describe the structural evolution of cryptocurrency exchange listing processes from 2017 to 2025. It outlines four distinct phases:
1. **Community-Priced Era (2017-2018)**: A chaotic "milk teeth" period where listings were driven by community votes and loud narratives, with exchanges acting as passive platforms seeking user growth.
2. **Exchange-Priced Era (2019-2022)**: The "teeth-growing" phase where exchanges (e.g., via IEOs/Launchpads) became gatekeepers, providing due diligence and using new listings to empower their own ecosystem tokens.
3. **VC-Priced Collapse (2023-2024)**: A "malocclusion" period where high FDV, low float VC deals dominated, causing token prices to peak at launch. Excountered, exchanges intervened with measures like HODLer airdrops to redistribute value to retail users and counter VC dominance.
4. **Market/Derivatives-Priced Era (2025)**: The "orthodontic" phase marked by industrialization. Price discovery shifts to derivatives, with pre-market perpetual合约 trading allowing price formation before spot listing. Mechanisms like Binance Alpha act as a sandbox, requiring projects to prove market resilience.
Concurrently, the "listing fee" model evolved: from direct payments to exchanges, to sharing tokens with the exchange's ecosystem, and finally to a current model where projects must allocate a significant portion of their token supply (3-7%) for user airdrops and marketing, effectively making listing a major customer acquisition cost.
The core thesis is a transfer of pricing power: from community -> exchange -> VC -> finally to the market itself via sophisticated derivatives. The article concludes that the era of easy gains from simple listings is over, demanding greater professionalism from both projects and traders.
marsbit15m ago
