Securing a Coin Listing on Major Crypto Exchanges Won’t Guarantee Any Token Success

Once upon a time, people believed that launching ICOs was easy. They just created flashy sites talking about decentralization and the blockchain revolution. That was 2017. Unfortunately, 2018 came and swept all the bad companies down. In fact, it swept all companies down in the blockchain world. Is there any formula for success in the blockchain industry? Apparently, no.

While it is widely assumed that securing a listing in a big exchange can do wonders for your token, the truth is that there is no recipe for an altcoin’s success. Many ICO buyers and project leaders have been fooled into believing that this will ensure the success, but we can see that many companies have struggled despite being listed in big exchanges.

The “Holy Grail”

Many teams consider being listed in an exchange like Binance to be the Holy Grail of altcoins. Telegram groups are full of people asking when the tokens are going to Binance and this looks like a pivotal move. However instrumental this may be, it is only a step.

Certainly, there is a boost in popularity for being listed and this can add liquidity to a company but Binance will not save a token if the hard work is not done afterward. Many project leaders are simply unable to build a real community and enhance their product to keep it alive and kicking.

This way, while it may look like the ultimate goal, being listed is simply not more than one of the first steps to success. The real Holy Grail lies way ahead of a Binance listing.

The Demand Problem

So you listed your exchange. What now? What can you actually do with all the liquidity that only a tier-one exchange can provide to you if you simply do not have any demand for your token? Okex, Huobi and Binance can provide you with all the liquidity that you need, but never the traders to buy your token. People will probably just sell a bad token and exchange for ETH or BTC.

Many projects fail at this level specifically because they are so hyped with the idea of being listed that they forget the demand. Binance had $1.3 billion USD worth in tokens traded in the last 24 hours. When you see the tokens on the bottom of the list, though, you can see that some of them captured between 0% and 0.01% of the total trading on the platform.

This can point to a hard truth: there is no volume for many altcoins on major exchanges. In Okex, the volumes are even worse than Binance and many of the trading pairs have had zero or a single digit volume in the last 24 hours. As an example, only $1 USD worth of Unikoin Gold (UKG/ETH) was traded in the last 24 hours and 50% of the trading pairs have less than $35,000 USD in volume.

Huobi is marginally better than Binance and Okex as its least popular token still trades at least $1,000 USD daily. Bitfinex, the fourth largest exchange in the world, however, is as bad as Okex.

Many of these companies have listing fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars and they do not provide any demand for the token. Listing is not the Holy Grail, there is no Holy Grail. You just have to do a great project, as even the good ones seem to be in a bad situation lately.