Binance Launchpad: Setting the Industry Standard
The Binance Launchpad team would like to share some thoughts on our offering — including the rigor of our diligence and the value proposition we offer to both Binance users who gain exposure to quality projects and teams who use our platform as an alternative to traditional, private fundraising.
Background
At Binance, our mission is to spread the freedom of money. Core to this mission is enabling communities to participate in and support project teams that are building networks whose value accrues to a native digital asset.
As part of our evolution, we reintroduced public sales in early 2019 through Binance Launchpad, a platform for offering token sales to our user base. Since then, we have helped projects raise a total of ~$27 million through our platform to continue building their networks.
We offered our first Launchpad sale of 2019, Bittorrent, in January during a difficult bear market. The sale was successful and the project has generated positive returns for our users since the offering. Shortly thereafter, many exchanges followed suit by offering their own versions of Launchpad, in what the industry has collectively referred to as an “IEO,” or Initial Exchange Offering. Since then, we have seen many exchanges begin offering IEOs, with varying levels of diligence, quality and performance.
Process
At Binance Launchpad, one of our core differentiators as a platform is the rigor and depth of our diligence process. We care deeply about protecting our users, and while we do not nor will we guarantee returns on Launchpad token purchases, we feel confident that we source, review and offer compelling projects for our users on the platform.
Unlike many ICOs of 2017, where projects were able to raise capital simply through posting whitepapers on websites, we have a dedicated, full-time team analyzing every Launchpad candidate. Our team conducts extensive due diligence across team, technology, economics, community, go to market strategy, and commercial/strategic execution. We look for strong teams who are typically in later stages in terms of product maturity with significant technical development and a history of delivering on their communicated milestones. We also look for projects that have reasonable valuations and have been prudent in their cash burn & fundraising strategies, such that our users have the opportunity to participate in the growth of these networks.
Value Proposition
Our leadership team has alluded to the value of Launchpad in previous publications, but we would like to share some additional thoughts. As a trusted partner of many projects in the space, we have a compelling value proposition for both our users and the project teams themselves.
- Binance Users: Launchpad offers a unique opportunity for our users to participate in high-quality projects that have been thoroughly reviewed by our team. We work hard to curate a collection of top projects at attractive prices for our users. As always, we communicate that investing in digital assets is risky and we offer no guarantee of returns, but our portfolio of launchpad projects has performed extremely well thus far. We hope to continue this trend by filling our pipeline with great projects that can properly leverage our ecosystem to both increase awareness and drive adoption of digital assets.
- Project Teams: Our Launchpad service is uniquely valuable for projects across both distribution and liquidity. Once we select a project for Launchpad, we work very closely with the team as a trusted advisor. We offer detailed guidance on token mechanics and structuring, PR, community-building campaigns, and a variety of other key aspects that support a successful sale.
A few recent examples highlight the reach and impact of our platform for Launchpad projects: Celer’s app promo generated 11,700+ downloads with 5,300 state channels opened and users from 55 countries; Harmony’s puzzle app promo generated 52,000+ new users and increased their Twitter social following by more than 10x. Some projects may use our platform as their main capital raising mechanism, while others use it to augment fundraising in the private markets. In all cases, we offer extensive reach to distribute tokens as we intentionally keep maximum allocations low in order to optimize for distribution across a broad group of users, investors, developers, and other stakeholders who will ultimately be the ones to use the tokens in their respective networks.
In summary, we believe we have a valuable and compelling offering to a variety of stakeholders. We work to balance the right cadence of projects with quality. We may do multiple projects in a month, or we may wait a month if we determine we have not found the right project fit. Overall, our goal is to support the ecosystem by offering access to our users and support for promising project teams to help drive adoption and awareness.
We are still learning. We have incorporated community feedback as we have evolved our model and we will continue to listen and actively request ideas and thoughts on how we can improve. Our goal, as a market leader in the space, is to provide a safe and secure trading environment for our users, and offer a successful distribution platform for projects with innovative technologies.
As always, thank you for your support!
Launchpad Team