The best chance for Binance to flip is 2022, the second best is now

After DeepSeek R1 leaves, Sam Altman will give you GPT-4.5 and the CoT process, which will improve your Deep Research. This is not because they have a change of heart, nor because they have become good people, but because the little whale has been here.

With the help of AI, cracks have appeared in the pillars of platform capitalism, and small teams and individual developers have the opportunity to surprise large companies. Under the impact of Hyperliquid and PumpFun, Binance began to take listing seriously, building the BSC Meme ecosystem, and respecting the basic human rights of retail investors in Binance wallets.

But the situation is not exactly the same. The Bonding Curve that Pump Fun relies on is not a new paradigm. In the DeFi Summer of 2020, the Order Book, AMM (Automated Market Maker) and Bonding Curve competed with each other. In the end, AMM became the first choice of DEX, and the Order Book hid in CEX and Perp DEX to form its own system,ly dormant in the crowd and ceased fighting.

So far, all the history of blockchain is the history of trading platforms.

Different from the stereotype, in the spot trading scenario, CoWs combines AMM and order book mechanism, introduces Solver operation to improve matching efficiency, and the coincidence of demand is more intentional. The efficiency of contract trading products, dYdX and Hyperliquid are more like the convergent evolution of CEX.

In 2025, it will be meaningless to measure decentralization, and transaction efficiency will be the core. The above formula should be rewritten in the following format:

It should be noted that the asset issuance model and the asset issuance platform are mixed here. The two are like the wave-particle duality of light, entangled in both directions and difficult to separate.

For example, NFT, FT and Memecoin are all asset issuance models, but different assets will also inspire different new platforms. For example, OpenSea and Blur are already the tears of the times. This article mainly explores what the next asset platform will be.

Whether BSC takes on the new wave of Meme or Base starts the stock chain drama again, it is essentially a change in the asset issuance model. Instead of FOMOing specific tokens, it is better to focus on model changes.

After all, What we really want to know is not how Binance is, but how Binance was formed and how to replace Binance.

The time you get on board determines your position in the industry

I miss the summer of 2020 so much, even more than the windy 2018.

Reversing the development history of the entire trading platform from now on, Binance in 2017 was indeed the child of the times. This has been recorded in Cryptocurrency From Pioneer to Old Money - Changpeng Zhao, so I will not repeat it here.

*Note: The horizontal axis of the above figure is the number of days since the establishment of each trading platform, and the bubble size is the current trading volume, among which FTX is the previous average trading volume (in memory of SBF for one second).

From the figure, we can see that CEX started the earliest and is the most crowded track. From 2010 when Mt.Gox started trading BTC to 2022 when FTX ended and Binance became the king, it has experienced 12 years of brutal competition. Today's compliance and equity investment are just a boring interwar period.

However, the establishment of Binance did not completely end the competition among trading platforms. In the 2020 DEX war, on-chain transactions are finally no longer just a gimmick, but a profitable real business for LPs. However, $UNI is a semi-residual product of a hasty response to SushiSwap, and it has not unified the chain like Binance.

FTX in 2022 is the real crisis moment of Binance. The SEC's high leverage regulation and money laundering charges have allowed the well-established SBF to take FTX to great lengths, but the subsequent story is well known to everyone, leaving only a sigh.

And the on-chain DEX did not flip Binance in 2020/2022/2025. The spot trading volume of DEX accounts for at most 15% of CEX, as if it has become an invisible catastrophe.

Curve's large-scale stablecoin exchange, Ethereum represented by Uniswap/Jupiter, Solana DEX, and Memecoin represented by Pump Fun are the entire story of on-chain spot DEX. Four years is still early, and it is still unknown whether AMM+Bonding Curve+order book will work.

By comparison, the biggest problem of DEX is that there is no absolute market giant, which is inconsistent with the situation of Binance's dominance. Driven by market efficiency, organized people will normally defeat unorganized people. The reason for this, I guess, may be that the transaction itself requires strong intermediary matchmaking. The stronger the intermediary, the more serious the centralization, but the higher the transaction cost and success rate.

This is more obvious in Perp DEX. Hyperliquid can reach up to 10% of Binance's daily trading volume, but the multi-chain deployed Uniswap's daily trading volume is only US$1.5 billion. The recent high was 5.7 billion on January 19th for Uniswap V3, finally catching up with the rumored annual fee profit of Binance.

The biggest problem with spot DEX and Perp DEX is that the trading volume cannot be increased, but the fault does not lie with Uniswap. In a sense, the split between the public chain and L2 is the culprit. The solution given by Crypto is chain abstraction, which is equivalent to re-walking the aggregation path of centralized exchanges, but in the name of decentralization, it first splits and then mends, and repeats this process over and over again.

Of course, BitMEX and Aevo are more innovative. The former developed the perpetual contract product type, and the latter launched the Pre-launch (pre-market trading) mode. But unfortunately, they were copied by other CEXs, and the old predecessors were killed.

OpenSea and Blur are typical examples of entering the wrong industry. The NFT market has been falsified at different stages. Whether to issue coins, go public, or do Rollup has lost its meaning of discussion.

We can make a preliminary conclusion that there will be no new players in CEX, especially spot CEX. If you don’t believe it, you can check the experience of Backpack, the spiritual sequel of FTX, the orthodox bonus of Solana, and the simultaneous development of wallets and CEXs are all useless.

To date, the only trend in 2025 is the on-chain competition of exchanges, which will start the proxy war of wallets, DEX and Meme. However, we need to understand why these factors are the case and why exchanges are the main venue.

DeFi Renaissance

In front of the universe, we are always children, and in front of Binance, we are always leeks.

One ​​day in the cryptocurrency world is like one year in the real world. The establishment time of the trading platform and the current trading volume alone are not enough to show the rapidity and cruelty of the paradigm shift. According to the explosive events of each trading platform, we can more clearly outline its development path:

On the chain - off the chain - on the chain again.

The most initialized on-chain ecology is completely centered around Bitcoin. P2P does not mean micro-loans, but peer-to-peer transactions. However, the transaction efficiency is obviously not high. The purpose of Ethereum 1.0 is to make everything happen on the chain, including but not limited to transactions and DeFi.

• On the chain: In addition to Binance, Coinlist can participate in public token offerings;

• Off-chain: Outside of China and the United States, Upbit has taken a 9.44% market share relying on the market of one country;

• On the chain again: In addition to spot and contracts, Polymarket has proved the feasibility of on-chain prediction markets.

From the sky-high Filecoin fundraising of $150 million on Coinlist in 2017, to the 2024 election predictions driven by Trump, the launch of $TRUMP and the BTC strategic reserve initiative, Crypto has officially gone against itself and become a part of the existing system, just like the development history of trading platforms.

From the perspective of the plot, the existing trading platforms can be roughly divided into four styles of products:

It can be found that large exchanges with Chinese backgrounds such as Binance and OKX are difficult to be classified into a certain category, because they are mixing innovations, copying and modifying, both on and off the chain, hoping to build an All in One circular ecosystem like WeChat, so transactions must be done in spot and contracts, and the ecosystem must have wallets and L1/L2, at the same time, stablecoins, DeFi, financial management and compliance licenses must be mixed, and VCs and market makers must also be deployed and controlled.

In addition to the established "greed for more" product thinking, more importantly, the larger the company, the less it can give up small threats. BitMEX pulled the plug on March 12, 2020 to save the market, but in return it gradually disappeared; the more head, the more it has to look at the traffic effect of the explosive point event. Robinhood, as a brokerage platform, was involved in the GME and Dogecoin dispute, and the result was that black and red were also red.

How did BitMEX disappear, how did Robinhood come about, these two problems continue to exist, and are more worthy of reflection than the sudden birth and death of FTX.

In other words, the Binance we face today is not the Binance of 2017, but the new Binance that focuses on "diverting" BNB Chain and wallet ecology after regulation, just like OKX Wallet is willing to remove DEX aggregators to be truly compliant.

There is a further conclusion. As long as you follow specific operations and strategies to act, when you reach the critical point, the tipping point will come, and nonlinear growth will become a reality.

Now let's answer why exchanges are the main players: the on-chain competition is an inevitable move after exchanges have eaten up the existing market share. Hyperliquid's active offensive has brought about the prosperity of BNB Chain Meme.

But wallets are not new products, and L2 has been frequently criticized because of Ethereum. Only exchanges have the ability to continue to do it. This proxy war also needs the audience, that is, the attention of retail investors.

DeFi has become the focus again, and the Meme craze is just a preview of a larger-scale money offensive in the future.

Life is based on negative entropy, and transactions are based on retail investors

Playing with the pointer of time, flying in the shadow of fate, the embodiment of pranks and fraud!

Before, wallets were considered the second traffic entrance after exchanges;

Now, public chains are considered to be more important on-chain portals than exchanges;

In the future, wallets with built-in transaction function products and the main sites of various institutes will be indistinguishable from each other.

For a long time, the chain has been regarded as an unbearable existence like Cthulhu, just an ATM for a few scientists to roam freely, but the off-chain ecology has reached its extreme, and the band-like migration to the chain has become the mainstream paradigm. The local dog and golden dog competitions started by Dogecoin in 2021, the small picture craze started by NFT in 2022, the inscription gold rush in 2023, and the Meme sweeping trend in 2024 reached its peak.

Especially inscriptions and NFTs, compared with OpenSea and Blur, the NFT built-in market of the exchange is almost smooth. This is the first failed track of Binance, and Trust Wallet and Binance Wallet are actually the second, but unfortunately NFT has not become the mainstream trend of the industry, and the exchange escaped.

And the inscriptions/runes, together with BTC L2/BTCFi, have become a detour in the development of BTC. After the false fire, only a mess is left, leaving the project parties who cannot issue coins with nothing but regrets.

Today, the exchanges that can survive are still the main force, but compared with the competition between exchanges, the on-chain layout is softer. Coincidentally, they are all choosing the basic configuration of wallet + L2. OKX even continues to launch X Layer on the premise of already having EVM L1. Backpack is relatively special. Its relationship with Solana is like that between FTX and Solana, unclear but closely connected.

Even Kraken, which has always been slow, forced itself to develop wallets + Ink L2, but it has basically no market voice, far less than Base, which is booming with AI, Meme, stablecoins, and RWA.

The same is true for OKX's X Layer. It seems that OKX is born to conflict with the public chain. It finally made a wallet, exempted from gas fees for many years, and worked hard to get the EU license, but was overtaken by Binance Wallet in one day.

The reason why it is in the form of Meme is more due to the forced pull of BNB Chain, snatching liquidity from Solana, which is showing signs of fatigue and in the post-$TRUMP era. However, the era of Meme is over, and BNB Chain will not last long with only Meme.

Not only are exchanges being centralized, but public chains/L2s themselves will also be highly centralized, leaving only Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, and Base. Please forget Sonic, just like forgetting Monad/MegaETH. Only public chains/L2s that work with exchanges can survive, and Ethereum is an extreme outlier.

After a short TGE and liquidity subsidy, it will fall into a long period of silence and boredom.

So a blockchain without coins can be Base, but an exchange without users will definitely be FTX. The importance of retail investors is not in the glory days, but the lifeline of the product.

Therefore, in the on-chain era, retail investors are even more important. Referring to the user stickiness of the Internet, most retail investors will not frequently change the exchanges they use. Now the competition for user stickiness on the chain will be reflected in the retention of wallets. This is the fundamental reason why wallets need to have built-in SWAP or introduce and recommend more dApps.

Now we can answer why it is a proxy war, because the competition between exchanges has ended, and it is difficult for the on-chain ecology to have complete exclusivity. OKX Wallet will not reject BSC's Meme, and Coinbase also hopes to use Base to go out of the US market and compete with Binance globally.

Conclusion

During the Renaissance, the Medici family was the behind-the-scenes hero, but they will eventually disappear in the clouds of history.

Let's get to the topic. After the OKX DEX aggregator dies, will Binance once again perform the glory of the exchange era? To be precise, will the asset issuance platform inevitably move towards an extreme minority?

GMGN can achieve a peak of $2.3 million in handling fees, which is a new platform spawned by new assets;

Hyperliquid replicates the miracle of Binance listing, mainnet tokens and LP income, which is Pinduoduo's reversal after imitating Taobao;

In addition, Binance missed the entire NFT era, which has proved that Binance is by no means invincible. Ben Zhou can also distinguish CZ's goodwill, which shows that practitioners will also learn, review and grow.