Analyzing Binance, Sahara, and Sign: How do top projects overcome the dilemma of "attention cycles" and "liquidity"?

Author: jiayi

introduction

With the advancement of AI technology, the technical barriers to entry for Web3 products are relatively decreasing, leading to even fiercer competition for attention and traffic in marketing. However, marketing capabilities remain a crucial element that most projects tend to overlook. Therefore, XDO has launched this "Web3 Market Annual White Paper" to present market experience in a report format, breaking down and sharing excellent marketing design ideas, hoping to provide assistance to entrepreneurs and industry market practitioners.

In 2025, the changes in market activities were clear: project teams were forced to shift from an excessive pursuit of seemingly prosperous DAU to pragmatic metrics like trading volume and TVL, which directly generate revenue. As a result, activity templates became fewer, activity formats simpler, and the mindset of both project teams and users became more pragmatic. Users also began to care more about the safety of their principal and the certainty of returns, while project teams focused more on obtaining real liquidity, real trading users, and a sustainable business growth curve visible to platforms and the market before listing.

In short, 2025 is the "Year One of New Settlement Metrics" and also the "Year One of Entry Point Competition." When growth targets become driven by actual benefits or value, such as "funds staying/transactions occurring," competition naturally shifts to "who can better retain users' fund-related behaviors within their own ecosystem."

This is why wallets are beginning to have their strategic significance redefined. Take Binance as an example: Binance Wallet is gradually becoming a new ecosystem entry point: driving traffic to the main site, pre-listing project pools, and integrating trading behavior into the product through points and tasks. Platforms want more than just a large number of participants; they want sustainable liquidity and a user base that generates continuous trading. Therefore, activities are no longer just about projects unilaterally providing subsidies, but rather a three-way benefit structure involving the platform, projects, and users: the platform leverages its liquidity and trading users as an advantage, projects exchange tokens and budgets for traffic and trading activity, and users exchange attention and trading for predictable returns.

But the harsh reality of 2025 lies here: the more pragmatic the expectations for events become, the more compressed the attention cycle is , and the "freshness period" of new projects is ridiculously short . Once a project reaches its TGE (Trusted Token Offering), market attention drops sharply, so project teams concentrate resources on the launch and sprint of Pre-TGE, and the continuous operation after TGE is underestimated in the long term, gradually turning Post-TGE into a hollow area. Users can sense whether something is being done and whether there is continued activity after TGE, but in reality, not many projects can remain active after listing. On the one hand, this is because there are very few projects with a sustainable, essential business model, and on the other hand, project teams often do not pay enough attention to the continuous operation after TGE. Once a project enters a period of silence after listing, it is more difficult and more expensive to win back users after they have left—this is a warning left by 2025, and it is also an issue that must be addressed in 2026.

A deeper problem is the cultural disconnect: many projects create impressive pre-listing figures but neglect the need for cultural and spiritual symbols to sustain long-term consensus . The relationship between the community and the founding team is increasingly becoming a one-off collaboration of "doing tasks—getting rewards—and leaving." Projects focus heavily on data but lack a strong cultural foundation, or they lack any community consensus beyond simply profiting from airdrops and then shorting the market. Simultaneously, projects over-rely on KOLs, with more and more activities tailored specifically for them, detaching them from the core user base and transforming the community from participants into bystanders. When projects only care about the KOL group, it creates antagonism with retail investors. Furthermore, KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers) —the core group in the community who participate long-term, are willing to contribute consistently, and are willing to spread information spontaneously—are often overlooked.

This "2025 Web3 Marketplace Annual White Paper" will be presented on three levels:

• A review of the most representative marketing campaign types in 2025 reveals: platform-based campaigns, TVL (Total Value Limit) deposit-based campaigns, community-based engagement campaigns, and simplified narrative and promotional pacing, along with a breakdown of their respective driving mechanisms and amplification methods.

• In summary, 2025 saw a shift in the mindset of both project teams and users: users placed greater emphasis on certainty and realizable returns, while project teams increasingly used marketing activities as tools to acquire liquidity, trading users, and pre-listing momentum. Simultaneously, attention spans shortened, the hollowing out of Post-TGE tokens intensified, and the importance of cultural and community building was consistently underestimated.

• Looking ahead to 2026: How will the logic behind these activities continue to evolve, and what are the core trends and challenges that project teams need to confront?

  Thank you for reading this far. If you are not a marketing staff member of the project team, you can skip to Part 3.

Marketing of some projects that left a deep impression in 2025

For project teams, user behavior and psychology change every year, as do attention flows and distribution channels. Therefore, before designing a long-term strategic marketing campaign, three things need to be clearly understood. First, what type of users do you want to target? Second, what benefits can you offer them? (Ideally, this benefit shouldn't involve overdrawing your own tokens, but rather be provided by a third party). Jiayi has previously explained how to design core long-term business marketing strategies that "profit from the user's efforts," which can be read for further reading. Third, how smoothly will users participate in your activities? Are there any bugs that can be exploited? And what is the art of balancing the interests of the studio and current task metrics?

2.1 Using core advantages to exchange for benefits such as target tokens to seize the market, a prime example is Binance Wallet's overwhelming victory over OKX Wallet to secure the top spot.

Wallets, once passive tools, have now become scalable marketing infrastructure. @Binance Alpha is a prime example of a platform whose capabilities are highly aligned with user motivations. It also surpassed OKX Wallet and left it far behind through the aforementioned long-term marketing strategies.

Binance Alpha represents a truly disruptive innovation in crypto marketing. The key change is that the wallet transforms from an "asset storage tool" into a "project discovery hub." Binance has placed the discovery portal for early-stage projects directly within @BinanceWallet. Users no longer need to search for new projects on external platforms; instead, they can explore projects and earn rewards directly within their wallet. Binance Alpha highlights projects with momentum, and if a project performs well enough on Alpha, it may be considered for future spot listings. The entire system creates a positive feedback loop:

The project wants exposure and traffic → Users join and receive rewards → The project gains highly relevant new users → Binance gains higher wallet usage and more trading activity.

The key to Binance Alpha's success is that rewards are given to users who genuinely trade, generate liquidity, and are willing to pursue new projects. Binance's strengths lie in its liquidity and user base, and Alpha simply transforms these advantages into a more efficient distribution channel, while further squeezing out the survival space of second- and third-tier exchanges.

The project team contributes tokens as cost → in exchange for exposure and traffic on Binance, striving for liquidity + further token listing.

Binance imports users into its wallet → users then engage in trading activities.

Users trade and complete tasks → earn rewards → simultaneously contribute trading volume and liquidity to the project.

Binance aims to maintain the user structure that generates transactions within Alpha. As the project develops, the user structure also changes, so it needs to continuously optimize mechanisms and activities to allow users who provide core value to the project to passively benefit.

2.2 From KOL-centric marketing to emphasizing overall community culture building: Different voice marketing strategies from Kaito to Sahara

In the first half of 2025, an innovative project, @KaitoAI, emerged to address the issue of attracting public attention for projects. Most projects began using Kaito activities as their primary marketing channel. However, Kaito's incentive structure inherently favors those with greater influence, emphasizing visibility and rewards. This led to a fixed marketing strategy: projects seeking publicity collaborated with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders), who produced content, attracting general users. While this generated initial buzz, the community participation was weak, and the shared memory of the project was often dismissed as a KOL-driven advertising campaign. Consequently, project traffic was primarily channeled to the Kaito platform. From Kaito's perspective, it was undoubtedly successful, as it adhered to the core principles of strategic activity design I previously outlined.

The shift from third-party platforms to self-owned platforms for User Generated Content (UGC) began with XDO's client, @SaharaAI, conducting its ICO on @buidlpad. Sahara's starting point for UGC was "to get the community involved and to allow them to participate and benefit before the project's token launch." Sahara's UGC activities didn't rely on giving away money, requiring users to complete tasks, or setting up various leaderboards. Instead, they introduced a clear cultural symbol representing the Sahara AI community and brand—the mascot Bitsy (the ears in my profile picture represent Bitsy's big ears; they're incredibly cute, and I still use them). Coupled with the timing of Sahara's ICO on @buidlpad, this encouraged community evangelists to participate in the ICO early. This group was no longer just focused on free tokens but was a passionate target audience with trust in the project.

You'll see many users not just submitting assignments, but genuinely expressing themselves as Sahara members. Some are making videos with AI, some are drawing, some are writing serialized novels, some are creating promotional music and shooting music videos for the community, and some are even keeping daily handwritten diaries, recording their experiences in the Sahara community and why they like Bitsy and the Sahara AI team. When users are willing to record their stories in the buildl project in this way, it means they have already made the project and community a part of their own life story.

The results were also quite impressive.

• This time, the main force of UGC activities shifted from KOLs to ordinary users in the community, with the KOCs I mentioned above playing a significant role. Sahara AI's UGC content is no longer concentrated in the hands of a few people; the community has begun to produce and spread it spontaneously.

• The community developed a shared language, common symbols, and shared memories with the Sahara AI team. The mascot Bitsy became a meme and identifier that everyone in the community understood; people knew it was Sahara AI just by seeing the yellow, big-eared fox. The cost of discussion decreased, and the speed of dissemination increased.

• The real data brought about by the spread of community sentiment showed that the event topic #AIforALL surged to second place on the Twitter trending list, and the entire event attracted 330,000 users to participate. Sahara's initial public offering on Buidlpad also exceeded the original target by 700%.

  There were instances of users artificially inflating their engagement metrics. However, the ultimate reward was ICO participation eligibility and the team's manual screening of each UGC creator's content. Therefore, the ROI was extremely high. Based on this result and innovation, the ICO UGC event was continued by Buidlpad as a regular feature.

However, Sahara AI also has a shortcoming: Sahara's UGC activities can ignite the community in the market for a month, but the lack of sustainable cultural extension afterwards caused the momentum to drop. This is a common problem for many projects; they can only ignite the fire, but not fuel it. Although Sahara has proven to the market that culture can retain users, only continuous cultural output and community mechanism management can become a "religion" firewall to serve as a long-term moat. Cultural continuity after TGE must continue, and even more vigorously.

2.3 Simple slogans + precise rhythm control = a positive pre-listing sentiment; effective marketing rhythm control for Sign and Kite-type projects (B2B, weak community engagement, and projects where the product is difficult to perceive).

@sign, through its slogan "Sign Everything," built a Web3 orange empire. Sign's strategy focused on first expanding and strengthening its core user base, using the simplest slogan to brainwash users into equating Sign with a major project. It's important to understand that, in the market, Sign doesn't belong to the category of projects that can be quickly established as 'kings' through technology or product narratives. Founder @realyanxin once said, "The important thing is whether we can have 100 people in our community earning seven figures." He also mentioned that after TGE, the foundation will use tokens to support internal entrepreneurship within the community, essentially making the community realize that "following Sign can make money; TGE is not the end, but the beginning of the next stage."

I remember during the peak of Sign's popularity, Yan Xin and Sign's official community Twitter account interacted frequently with users, prioritizing interactions with those whose Twitter profiles included Sign elements. This gave users clear feedback: as long as you participate actively, as long as you're "one of us," you'll eventually be seen by the official team (see the sign). Being seen could potentially make you one of the community members who help you earn money with Sign. Sign's spread was more like organic growth; everyone did simple things together, then the official team gave ample recognition, the community shared tweets and helped each other like them, users optimized and packaged their accounts, etc., gradually forming a positive cycle where the more users participated, the easier it was for them to be seen, and the more willing they were to continue participating.

Another example is @GoKiteAI, which uses minimalist keywords and precise timing to convey project value to ordinary users and quickly align community understanding. Kite, as a public blockchain built for AI-era payments with AI technology as its core advantage, addresses the biggest concern of technology-driven projects: project teams that don't communicate in a user-friendly way, making users unable to see the differentiated value. To add to that, while early cryptocurrency public blockchains using such language might have increased user foxhoxia (fear of missing out), that era is long gone.

Kite's initial move, by showcasing names like @PayPal Ventures and @generalcatalyst, reduced uncertainty and provided initial credibility anchors, allowing users to make a realistic judgment: if even a giant like PayPal, the king of the payment sector, is willing to invest heavily in Kite as a bet on the AI payment field, it at least indicates that the team's technical capabilities are reliable, its capital resources are strong, and its potential to become a leader is amplified.

The second key move was for Kite AI to align its narrative with the unified payment standards the AI payment industry was aiming to establish. This made it easier for community users to immediately understand what it was doing. Kite clearly understood that the narrative of an AI Payment Chain was inherently difficult to explain. Simply explaining to users "how AI agents pay and settle payments..." wouldn't be understood by most, nor would they have the patience or willingness to learn. Therefore, Kite first convinced them that the project was on the mainstream path. Leveraging the then-current buzz surrounding x402 and PayPal, Kite released information in quick succession, highlighting the partnership with x402 and the investment from @Coinbase, as well as the positive news of the PayPal collaboration. Through Coinbase, they pushed x402 towards becoming a universal standard for AI-driven payments, and used the potential future clients of major companies as a pre-launch element of imagination. When people saw Kite linked to these names, they naturally guessed and were confident in the project's strategic capabilities.

Kite AI has significantly reduced the cognitive load for users. The community no longer needs to read white papers or study technical details; simply browsing a few news articles is enough to build trust in Kite AI.

2.4 Behavioral Mining Design Shift – How to Transform “Liquidity” into “Participation”: Plasma and Other Revenue-Generating Projects

In 2025, TVL-type yield projects exploded, with numerous lock-up activities appearing in the market. However, few projects truly converted liquidity into engagement and retention. Those deposit campaigns that achieved excellent results generally combined staking with token issuance expectations, partnering with liquidity giants to quickly achieve a FOMO (FoMo) effect. For example, @Plasma and @zerobasezk first attracted significant liquidity through Binance events, then channeled that liquidity into their own ecosystems, creating deep engagement – this was the essence of their market design. Furthermore, Buidlpad's HODL – a series of project campaigns offering ICO quotas and lower valuations for deposits – also achieved very good results.

Plasma's strategy aims to attract users by encouraging sustained stablecoin activity within the ecosystem. Plasma partnered with Binance Earn to launch an on-chain USDT yield product. Users can gain access to $XPL airdrops by periodically locking up USD₮ on Plasma. This design isn't a one-off event; rather, it's based on a daily snapshot plus a time-weighted staking reward mechanism, where longer holding periods and higher staking volumes amplify the final XPL reward.

At the time, the market was flooded with TVL (Total Value Limit) projects, many of which offered seemingly "high" subsidies, but were still designed to "whoever rushes in last." Plasma, however, used a time-weighted approach—the earlier you deposited, the longer you deposited, and the more you locked up, the more real, quantifiable, and calculable your contribution became. This brought about a shift in the incentive structure: Plasma determined allocation based on the cumulative weight of locked-up contributions. This allowed retail investors to truly feel that even depositing 10 USDT could yield an equivalent $XPL return, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for small investors. The combination of high subsidies and TVL attracted numerous retail investors.

Zerobase also first established a partnership with Binance Wallet, allowing users with high alpha points to participate in priority allocations through the Booster Program. This design first uses the exchange's own points and traffic mechanisms to attract users, then leverages points contributions/trading behavior to establish real allocation rights, ultimately bringing liquidity into its own ecosystem. Similar to Plasma above, both emphasize user behavior thresholds in their activity design.

Note: This article focuses more on the effectiveness of the activity, but excessive airdrop rewards will inevitably have a certain impact on one's own secondary market. Our industry has long since entered a period where both doing business and market making are equally important.

Both Plasma and Zerobase's designs demonstrate that:

1. Capturing liquidity through exchange entry points is fundamental – partnering with deep traffic channels like Binance is a prerequisite for explosive market participation.

2. Transform TVL/behavior into calculable rewards—truly link reward formulas to revenue contributions.

3. Secondary market strategies cannot be ignored – Plasma's spot trading incentive design ensures that liquidity does not just remain in locked-up data, but stays in the real market ecosystem, forming a stronger value cycle.

A Joint Shift in the Mindset of Project Developers and Users in 2025

Change 1: The activity KPI has shifted from a "DAU" (Daily Active Users) orientation to a "long-term profit contribution" orientation, focusing on core revenue scenarios and sustainable behavioral incentives. The approach of simply using subsidies to attract users without measuring revenue recovery is outdated.

The market logic of "billions in subsidies" was extremely crazy in the last round. Project teams attracted users by airdrops, subsidies, and tasks, making the DAU look very good. As a result, the last public chain cycle also had a period of apparent "on-chain prosperity". However, much of the activity did not correspond to real demand scenarios, let alone sustainable revenue and retention.

Therefore, in 2025, the market realized again:

• DAU is no longer the goal, and can no longer prove value on its own.

• The goals of the activity were more directly grounded in sustainable benefit scenarios.

This shift is forcibly solidified by platform rules and activity structure: in addition to the previously shared logic of acquiring Alpha Points being designed around "asset balance and Alpha transaction behavior", this is equivalent to anchoring the value of the activity to the settlement of early asset flows and transactions.

This also appears in the growth structure of Perp DEX / betting-based FI (such as prediction markets). Most projects' incentive mechanisms follow the path of "trading volume/deposits → points → rewards". Users either earn points by depositing funds or by continuously trading. The core of the activity is to exchange trading and fund usage for future rights or rewards.

Meanwhile, user-side evaluation methods are also changing: because the anticipated "fake bull market" didn't materialize in 2025, participants naturally prioritized "principal risk" and "return certainty." When evaluating activities in 2025, users typically first consider:

• Is the principal safe (will it be subject to fraudulent practices, are there any hidden rules, and is the withdrawal process smooth)?

• Is the return calculable (is there a guaranteed minimum return, and is payout predictable)?

• What will remain after subsidies stop (product retention, revenue model, long-term demand)?

The "transaction mining" model was first introduced seven years ago by an exchange called Fcoin, which quickly captured a large market share and even briefly shook the exchange landscape. However, it collapsed due to rampant fraudulent trading, leading to insolvency and the team's absconding. Transaction mining is an effective market grabbing activity, but very few projects can successfully and sustainably implement it in the long run.

Change 2: Shortened attention spans have led to a vicious cycle for project teams and users revolving around rapid token issuance and monetization.

The focus is on how this issue isn't just a problem for the cryptocurrency world, but also a fundamental change in society that everyone can see: from watching long videos at double speed to being too lazy to finish short videos; and from reading long articles in their entirety to reading them completely, just like this article.

The cryptocurrency market is a microcosm of the real-world leverage of capital and time, due to the rapid pace of industry narrative updates and short project lifecycles. This further compresses the attention span for projects to an extreme, turning a new project into an "old project" in just two weeks. A tacit consensus has formed between project teams and users: the days surrounding Pre-TGE (Pre-TGE) are typically the periods of highest liquidity. Therefore, everyone's attention is focused on the same point in time: project teams monitor Pre-TGE data, users monitor TGE cash-outs, and platforms monitor trading volume. Ultimately, the entire industry becomes a "top-heavy" structure—extremely crowded in the first half and hollow in the second half; the first half relies on marketing to gain exchange attention and meet targets, while the second half generates profits through the secondary market. This mainstream approach inevitably leads to the collapse of altcoins.

The consequence is that after TGE, everyone quickly moves on to the next TGE, Post-TGE is systematically abandoned, project teams lack the motivation to do long-term operation, and users have even less reason to stay. The market seems to have new projects every day, but behind it is just existing liquidity being shuffled around in different pools, while new narratives, new products, and new scenarios that can truly drive mass adoption are more difficult to grow.

For project teams, maintaining community relationships, retaining users, and developing a positive business model should be just as important as TGE, or even more important, rather than burning through the entire budget on TGE. Because once users leave after listing, the cost of winning them back is extremely high, which is the biggest hidden danger I've seen in the market dynamics of 2025.

Change 3: Crypto's overall size is increasing, but the initial spiritual belief that attracted many has faded – the focus on "listed token values" has squeezed out the "spiritual symbolism."

In 2025, many projects' marketing efforts increasingly resembled a purely "numerical engineering" approach: points, leaderboards, tasks, and subsidies could be scheduled weekly, KPIs could be reviewed daily, and growth could be broken down using a funnel method. However, founders talked less about their dreams and were less willing to spend time clearly explaining "who we are, why we exist, and what needs we want to solve." The community and the team also tended to operate under two separate languages—the team was only responsible for pushing data up, and the community was only responsible for completing tasks and receiving rewards.

Without a spiritual symbol, it's difficult for participation to solidify into a sense of belonging. Behind every great business lies a symbol of cultural revolution. Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance all owe their success to this cultural consensus. But today, the path these successful individuals paved is quickly forgotten by entrepreneurs and the market.

This is also a common pitfall I saw many projects fall into in 2025: they spent a lot of effort in the early stages to build up awareness and participation, but lacked a sustainable mechanism and rhythm. After completing one round, they assumed "the culture has been established" and then left the rest to the community to grow freely. But the reality is that culture is different from data.

It's not a one-time surge that automatically compoundes interest; it's more like "repetitive labor"—you need to constantly provide the community with a reason to participate, a symbol that can be repeated, and a scenario that allows you to solidify your identity. The ROI might not be attractive at first, but many things are about persistence and seemingly "unwise" methods that can catalyze great power in the long run. Yes, I want to mention again that Binance was the first exchange to propose a "unwise" solution of returning profits to users after the Chinese government's crackdown on exchanges in 2004. This led to hundreds of users from around the world becoming Binance angel investors for eight years, becoming the core spark for Binance's internationalization.

Change 4: Over-reliance on KOLs → disconnect from retail investors; KOCs (Key Opinion Leaders) are being ignored.

In 2025, I saw many project teams mistakenly believe that "market" = "KOL".

It seems that as long as you acquire top influencers, flood the topic page, and generate buzz, users will naturally stay. However, KOLs, as important voices, can amplify voices, but that doesn't equate to building relationships; they can stir emotions, but that doesn't guarantee building consensus. When a project allocates resources and benefits only to KOLs, ordinary users naturally develop a sense of detachment, even feeling like they're just there as a fleeting presence, as data, or as a backdrop. Once this mentality takes hold, the activity transforms from "bringing people closer" into "creating conflict."

Aster's recent Human vs AI trading competition is a prime example: the official event was a funded trading competition with limited spots, meaning not all users could directly register and participate. Instead, participants watched a group of KOLs trade, leading to the ridiculous yet inevitable scene of someone seemingly "profiting $10,000" and leaving. While such events are undoubtedly powerful in terms of reach and can easily create dramatic conflict, they also amplify a problem—when the main stage of an event belongs to only a select few, retail investors naturally lack a sense of participation, often resulting in discussions based on mere "spectator" interest rather than strong connections relevant to the users themselves.

KOLs are a crucial part of the industry, but their value was exaggerated significantly in 2025. Many projects mistakenly believed that marketing equaled simply developing KOLs, neglecting the fact that the real key to capturing public traffic is KOCs. KOCs may not have the biggest exposure, but they are definitely the most stable supporters, organizers, and long-term participants in their communities, and can even penetrate other communities. They can maintain the momentum of an event into a regular occurrence over a period of time, and can steer discussions back to a constructive direction when projects encounter fluctuations and doubts.

Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are very important community representatives. However, activities must prioritize users, and the power of Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) should not be overlooked. They should be treated as core assets and managed by establishing mechanisms that define their identities, participation paths, and long-term material and spiritual incentives.

Marketing Trends and Challenges in 2026

My assumptions about marketing trends in 2026 are based on the following premises: a bull market driven by state-owned enterprises and traditional financial giants will find it difficult to penetrate the counterfeit market; attention will become increasingly scarce, and the ROI of marketing focused solely on public domain traffic will approach negative levels; the AI era makes it harder for projects to differentiate themselves through technology and product, while the homogenized content from "everyone as a creator" on platforms like X will gradually cause users to lose interest; and more open regulations will foster competition for attention in both public and private domains.

Based on this, I believe 2026 will be a year of returning to simplicity:

1. The market will continue to compete on TGE pre-subsidy.

2. Low market capitalization, community-driven heavy participation before TGE, and activities that generate profits and can be repeated long-term have become the mainstream operational strategy for successful projects.

3. Users achieve significant results through a partnership-based trust model and a collaborative approach (a beautiful wish, but I believe some project teams will come to this realization).

4. Private domain community management is once again receiving attention.

This is purely for sharing with those who venture into this chaotic market.

In a fiercely competitive and volatile market, becoming the next unicorn is exceptionally difficult. Therefore, this article concludes by sharing an example from the legendary Binance, hoping to offer a tangible sense of hope.

Let's not forget that in the market environment in which Binance was founded, it was generally believed that it would be difficult to create the next centralized exchange giant; let's not forget that Binance also experienced the embarrassing situation of launching its products but having no users:

When BNB first launched its ICO in July 2017, it allocated 50% of its value to a public offering at a valuation of 20 million. By initially providing a sufficient number of tokens to retail investors, they were motivated to act as "shareholders" and follow the project team (opening low and rising high). As we can see, Binance did not disappoint. In just a few years, in addition to solidifying its position as the leading exchange, BNB rewarded its holders with a price increase of several thousand times.

Binance conquered the market by gaining user trust and possessing strong product-market fit (PMF) capabilities. During the 2017 crackdown on Chinese exchanges, Binance swiftly shifted its operational focus to overseas markets, choosing to buy back tokens at high prices amidst severe market panic and when most projects opted for RUG (Rugging). This is the origin of Binance's hundreds of angel investors worldwide—a religious-like community that project teams cannot imitate. From then on, Binance became their faith. From then on, Binance began its rapid penetration of local markets through angel investors from around the world. Binance transformed from a "Chinese exchange" into a global exchange.

The two co-founders, @cz_binance and @heyibinance, have no baggage in their entrepreneurial journey and are very clear that becoming KOLs is the most cost-effective form of marketing. They frequently speak out on social media, maintaining high exposure and communication, coupled with in-depth exchanges with the community through AMAs, truly managing both public and private traffic (angel investors).

Binance has been around for eight years, and I still believe its biggest crisis of trust stemmed from the massive North Korean hack. CZ immediately addressed the market with an AMA, and SAFU became a cultural hallmark. This textbook example of crisis management is something many projects still haven't mastered. Market operations are sometimes incredibly simple: it's not about knowing how to do it, but about whether to do it at all. I've given many projects a lot of effective advice. Unfortunately, the projects that ultimately stumbled were all due to a lack of courage and decisiveness.

Binance's rise to become the world's largest exchange and BNB's growth are mutually reinforcing, forming a positive spiral. BNB's story isn't just about "success due to coin price increases," but also about transforming "holding" into "using": fee discounts, in-platform spending and benefits, and consistently clear return expectations for holders, leading to BNB Chain Gas and its current status as a strong mainstream token. These mechanisms make the token more than just a trading instrument; they leverage BNB's wealth effect to attract new users, cultivate and retain loyal supporters, and then draw user behavior back into the platform ecosystem. The stronger the platform, the more use cases the token has, the stronger the willingness to hold it, leading to a reluctance to sell BNB for fear of missing out. This has made it a mainstream token. It also transforms many who were initially just buyers into more frequent users, moving from "buying" to "using" and then from "using" to "holding." When holders continuously gain benefits in usage scenarios, the platform's transactions and cash flow are more easily expanded; the platform's strength, in turn, strengthens everyone's confidence in BNB—this is what I consider an excellent positive spiral of "product growth ↔ token value" pushing each other forward.

Sincerity is always the ultimate weapon in the market. Only startups with product-market fit (PMF) can maintain a foothold in the market in the long run.