After spending a long time in the crypto world, people become increasingly accustomed to looking at numbers and emotions, rather than rational thinking. Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about Binance's early competition and platform mechanism vulnerabilities, but if we extend the timeline, many things actually show an inevitability in business evolution.
The inevitability of market clearing
Looking back at the well-known volatility at the end of 2022, many people were confused about who pushed over the first domino. However, from a macro-financial logic perspective, a structure that has a high leverage ratio and lacks underlying support is bound to collapse over time. In any mature financial market, when there is a significant liquidity gap, the chain reaction caused by overlapping positions is inevitable.
Large institutions choose to publicly exit when risks arise, which is essentially a basic means of asset protection. Although the process may seem drastic, it objectively completes a rapid deleveraging of the market, exposing potential hidden dangers in advance rather than deferring indefinitely.
About platform thresholds and ecological anchoring
Currently, the much-discussed coin listing models and token distribution ratios are actually a survival game as the industry enters its mid-to-late stages. Early projects had extremely low listing thresholds, resulting in a large number of price collapses and scams, ultimately harming liquidity providers. The ratios we see now referred to as 'taxes', if viewed from another perspective, resemble a form of long-term commitment. Platforms need project parties to hand over enough chips and bind them to native tokens (like BNB) or airdrop plans. The logical starting point for this practice is that only by increasing the default cost for project parties can a credit guarantee be forcibly established in an unregulated environment. This does indeed increase the burden on developers, but it is also currently the simplest, most blunt, and most effective means of screening project viability.
The reality of technological bottlenecks and pricing mechanisms
Regarding pricing fluctuations and liquidation disputes within a specific period, this touches on the eternal game between centralized exchanges (CEX) and on-chain oracles. In extreme market conditions, the synchronous delay of internal and external pricing engines is a technical problem that the entire industry has yet to solve. When market depth is suddenly exhausted, any value given by a pricing engine will appear distorted. To bystanders, this may seem like manipulation, but for system architects, it is more about algorithm failure in a liquidity vacuum. This is a limitation of technology under extreme pressure, and it is also the underlying risk that every participant accepts before entering such high-frequency volatile markets.
The symbiotic relationship between centralization and decentralization
We often say that the original intention of cryptocurrency is decentralization, but the reality is that without the traffic guidance and infrastructure construction of large centralized platforms, this technology may never reach mainstream audiences. From the promotion of BNB Chain to the support or competition against various emerging protocols, this is essentially an expansion of a business entity's territory. Giants provide the necessary liquidity depth and user access for the entire industry through their own scale effects. This status inevitably brings a certain degree of 'discourse power', which is often interpreted as hegemony.
A little reflection
The Binance of the CZ era actually represents the process of cryptocurrency transitioning from a 'geek experiment' to a 'financial industry'. In this process, many decisions often seem cold and exclusive for the sake of efficiency, security, and survival. This is not to defend a certain behavior, but we must acknowledge that at this stage, the industry still needs these centralized giants to carry the massive demand for transactions.
The essence of business is survival. When a platform carries the assets of tens of millions of people, its primary goal is no longer to please everyone, but to maintain the survival of the entire system. Under this logic, many points of contention are actually costs paid to maintain this balance.
We are in it, both beneficiaries of the rules and bearers of the costs.