To List or Not to List – That is Not the Question

The question is: How much to pay for a listing?

Ever since BTC hit the world news, blockchain and its derivatives have fuelled fevered minds with get rich quick dreams. These dreams have inspired developers from around the world to build up a demand to supply easy accessible trading sites to buy and sell BTC and all the other coins and tokens that evolved thereafter.

An entirely new ecosystem has evolved, a world of centralised and decentralised exchanges that all offer similar models of interaction all designed to bring traders into their site to make quick money.

Out of this ecosystem evolved two phenomena: Listings and Rankings

Listings are when a token creator wants to introduce the created token onto an exchange for trade.
Rankings are the method different sites use to meter exchange and currency activities.
IEO/ICO/ISO are methods of raising fiat or BTC/ETH capital for new tokens.

Let’s take a look at rankings first; there are a number of KPI’s to measure for ranking and these include ranking exchanges and ranking currencies.

Exchanges
Exchanges are ranked by the volume of trade they report, their asset liquidity, the number of asset pairs they trade in and their market coverage (what CMC calls web traffic factor) All these metrics are inaccurate as the most exchanges use market making bots (MMbots) to bolster their performance. Another aspect of trade manipulation are currency owners that trade with more than one wallet and manipulate the market buy buying and selling to themselves. Another aspect is that some sites are owned buy exchanges, such as CoinmarketCap which is owned by Binance, hence Binance is always no.1 in the ranking listing. Other ranking sites such as CoinGecko and CoinCodex have different methodologies to rank exchanges and currencies, hence the disparity between each ranking site. Add to this the fact that not all exchanges pay the exorbitant fees the ranking sites request, you get a lot of exchanges that are not ranked but are active.

Bottom line
Ranking sites charge exchanges for listing, so it is not an impartial review. For instance, Forbes, Time, Bloomberg, do not charge companies for rankings, the Forbes 500, 100 etc. is an impartial ranking of industry, whereas, ranking sites in the cryptocurrency world are money centric – pay and get seen, don’t pay and disappear.

Conclusions
The world of cryptocurrency started out as a new form of payment for the worlds population as a replacement to centralised currencies controlled by nations. What we are seeing is a new centralised currency controlled by rich people – not nations, not governments, not democratically elected officials, but by private entrepreneurs that just want to get rich and control the market.

Listing
Just like rankings but less odious, listings are the method in which an exchange will provide access to more asset trading pairs. Exchanges should be like printers, you pay a very small fee for the printer, but pay a higher fee for the ink…this translates into: a listing should be made easy and the trading fees should be higher. However, in reality, the currency creators have to pay anywhere between 0.5BTC to 20BTC to just be listed. (This translates into $4,500 to $200,000). Now why is this an issue? its an issue because every payment should have an ROI and an ROI must be quantifiable. Exchanges cannot offer an ROI on any amount, since their true nature is a secret. Exchanges will never tell you the truth of their community or trading volume. They will even claim that they have high liquidity (Which means they have a lot of stored assets) but this is BS since all assets are only as valuable as their trade value, and in most cases, these assets do not belong to the exchange, these are stored assets of currency owners and traders that have “exchange wallets”, and yes, this does show liquidity, but its doesn’t belong to the exchange. On the flip side, the higher the liquidity the more richer the trade opportunity, so this is really the only KPI that can be metered successfully.

Bottom line
Listing should be a rigorous process, and it is for most exchanges where the project offered must provide 5 pages of information. Where does the listing process go sour, when the exchange asks for thousands of dollars. If you are willing to pay $10K or $100K you need to make sure you will make a profit on that payment. In terms of listings, the only profit you get from a listing is access to a market that will trade in your token, but you will not see any of that income. All you will receive is trades, over which you have no control.

Conclusions
Paying exchanges large amounts of money without getting back definite proof of success is, just like anything else in the world of cryptocurrency; a gamble. Exchange liquidity is proof that currencies are being held in the exchange and there is trade, however, the fees for listing should be low and the trading fees should be made more lucrative for the exchange, essentially trading the one time listing fee against multiple trade fees of the token.

IEO/ICO/ISO
It doesn’t matter what you call it, the bottom line is that it sells tokens for BTC/ETH or fiat. The main difference between them are as follows:
An IEO is when an exchange makes the offering, and uses its community reach to market the potential of the token.
An ISO is the same as an IEO, in that it aims at marketing via social media specifically, and offers social variants for procuring the tokens.
An ICO can be done by anyone with a token, it does not necessarily have to be done via an Exchange, so if it is done by an exchange uts not an ICO its an IEO or an ISO.

Now let’s review the fees of an IEO, most, in fact all exchanges charge a very large flat fee for an IEO. Their claim is that they work hard to market the token. Well bully for you…if you work so hard, then have a success rate fee and take 25%, 35% even 50% as a success fee over a certain minimum amount.

You see, its like this, an exchange takes no risks when you pay them up front, it wins before the token is listed, so whether the IEO is successful or not…who cares. Whereas, if the payment were only in success fees from a basic amount, then the onus is on the exchange to make success.

Now to be fair to exchanges, not every project is attractive, so in this instance, it is up to the exchange to mitigate risk. They should set a very low minimum success amount for the riskier projects and raise the success ratio so that they cover their bases.

Bottom line
No one should have to pay for an IEO, it should be a success rate based activity, where the exchange and the token owner work together to make sure they both earn as much as possible.

Conclusions
Most of the exchanges are not interested in the success or failure of their hosted tokens. The top 10 currencies provide enough leverage for most, and all the collateral tokens are just something to make their board different from the next.

Evolution/Projection
I doubt if anyone can project where cryptocurrencies will evolve to, however, it is here, and some countries are adopting it fully, others are accepting it and a few are dead against it. The reality is that eventually they will be regulated, nothing can stop this from happening for one simple reason. At the moment it is regulated by a few ranking sites that control the market, followed by shady owned exchanges that also control large markets but not for public trading, but rather for washing fiat via their systems. NGO’s and Governments are starting to work together on a national and international level to regulate via tax purposes the “not-decentralised because it is controlled by a few billionaires” crypto currency market.

At the end of the day, the so called token as a replacement for company stock/shares will end, and the very fact that tokens are given a fiat value means they can be taxed. This will all lead to regulated system, and thereof control by the national and international regulators.

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