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Binance has barely skipped a beat since CZ stepped down.
And it’s not like the odds aren’t stacked against it — even to the point that much of the world outside crypto has been outright hostile to it.
The past few years have seen rolling bans and other jurisdictional roadblocks across parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. That includes a grueling eight-month ordeal in Nigerian jail for Tigran Gambaryan, Binance’s head of financial crime compliance who’d been arrested on spurious money laundering charges.
Then there’s increasing competition within the crypto space. Rival offshore crypto exchanges including Bybit, Bitget and Gate.io have all grown their footprints to fill parts of the sizable gap left by FTX.
Still, Binance persists as the number one venue by trade volume. CoinGecko points to $9 billion in normalized daily volume on Binance right now. Bybit is a distant second with $3 billion, followed by Coinbase with $2.6 billion.
Binance’s ability to serve memecoin traders what they want seems to be its key to success — at least at this part of the cycle.
In fact, Binance has effectively cornered the memecoin game: Kaiko in December calculated that the exchange was controlling 44% of memecoin volume on CEXs.
Empire’s Jason Yanowitz brought some of this up with new(ish) CEO Richard Teng on today’s podcast episode:
“I thought you guys would have to stop doing a lot of the things [Binance did] to get to the place it got to: Listing things early, getting out to new markets early,” Yanowitz said.
“But you guys are still listing a lot of memecoins. You’re still very early to listings. You have new Launchpool projects in the last couple of months — Binance has given users a lot more trading opportunities. It kind of goes against what I thought would happen.”
One dashboard tracking new tokens listed on Binance in 2024 lists 37 coins, nine of which are memes including HMSTR, BABYDOGE, TURBO and DOGS. The platform also recently added perps for AI coins — next-gen memecoins — AI16Z, ZEREBRO and GRIFFAIN with up to 75x leverage.
Teng responded by stating that Binance lists fewer coins compared to many of its competitors, itself a function of the listing processes that protect the interest of its users.
“If you look at the number of coins that we list, it’s around 600. We are very, very stringent with the coin selection process on that front. We have published the listing criteria and we ringfence the listing team so much that we give them the time and space to do their independent due diligence.”
Co-host Santiago Santos then probed for an answer on listing fees — one of the last great lucrative aspects of crypto exchanges still opaque to outsiders.
“[Binance’s] distribution is unparalleled — when you think about the overall fees [for Launchpad listings], is it like a dollar amount or a notional amount — is it a token supply amount, and if so, I’m curious how that has evolved over time,” Santos said.
Teng declined to comment by saying that those details were very specific. Better luck next time, I guess.
