Getting Listed to Centralized Exchanges

🗂 Proposals 💡 Ideas & Improvements
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Summary

We want to create this thread to understand the community’s sentiment about being listed on a Centralized Exchange (CEX) and your feedback, mainly regarding advantages and disadvantages. In this way, the Pilot League would be able to decide whether or not to take action for this kind of initiative.

As you know, the Pilot League is working on growing the Idle ecosystem while also following community discussions that happen outside of the forum (e.g., Telegram, Discord), and this topic has been mentioned several times.

Reports and considerations

Main concerns about getting listed on CEXs generally are the risk of having unusual and speculative short-term token price increase or decrease and a short volume spike; regarding this we picked up some articles and researches carried out during the last two years:

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“Chart shows five-day cumulative performance distribution of digital tokens after their day of listing, across six big cryptocurrency exchanges, since May 2020. Tail ends identify extreme highs and lows, while shaded areas are upper/lower quartiles surrounding average and median returns. Extreme outliers are removed”.

Some final considerations extracted from these sources:

  • When it comes to CEXs, there is a positive impact on asset value soon after the announcement is made;
  • CEXs enable small investors to get access to the tokens without having to sustain high gas cost when the Ethereum network is clogged;
  • Listings in large exchanges benefit the tokens with a broader reach of institutional and retail investors;
  • CEXs listings have the potential to have a positive impact on asset value but don’t affect all tokens in the same way;
  • Mandatory KYC is a drawback of CEXs.

Next steps

Now it’s time to express your opinion on the following points:

  1. What are the pros and cons you see in general on being listed on a CEX?
  2. Do you think that, at the moment, having $IDLE listed on a CEX could help the growth of the Idle ecosystem?
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I think the most is already mentioned.
But in my opinion it’s a fact that you won’t get enough exposure without a CEX. We will need to go with the big names.
Yes, there will be pump and dumps because of it…
But who cares, that’s the risk everyone in crypto knows about… at the end, the price will always be higher and you have a lot more exposure.

Absolutely, because it will attract a lot more people, also new Devs who will be interested and who had never heard about idle before.

WE SHOULD GO FAST IN THIS.
Because the competition in crypto is HARD.
If we don’t do this, others will with a copy… and then $IDLE WILL END ON THE BACKGROUND.

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I am personally fully in favour of this approach.

(Mainly focusing on T1’s/ T2’s)

The Good:

  • With the growing price of Ethereum its becoming very expensive and challenging to gain more users / community members. CEX will allow easier access for smaller holders to accumulate the token
  • Larger exchanges opens access to big volume
  • We gain more holders - users that will become more aware of your platform and will get more involved in terms of the governance / ideas
  • With more holders brings a stronger community, Listing on big T1s is easy marketing and exposure to IDLE, which again creates a snowball effect of exposure.
  • Uni / sushi are good Dex’s but not everyone uses them. We leave ourselves quite limited.
  • Bigger volume, brings bigger marketcap which then brings more frequent connections & interest.
  • Listings are free (Well should be, one should never need to pay for a listing) We are currently at an advantage being ERC20 based as due to the market conditions (“Bull market”) exchanges are very slow at connecting native networks and can list ERC faster due to demand.

The bad

  • Manipulation (but this is minor as it can happen on any exchange)
  • Initial pump on listing (sometimes insider info pumps) again minor, all depends on the token. Fundamentally strong tokens recover very well. Makes no odds as we could be targeted any time on uni / sushi by private pump groups. No way of really avoiding that scenario.

To be honest, the positives outweigh the negatives for me.

I always see Uni/Sushi the start point for any ERC based project, it would be disappointing for something like IDLE not to go for CEX’s / larger exchanges
I have been in the space for 5 years approx and have worked with a good few well established projects. Conquering the top main exchanges is always a goal (Coinbase, Binance, Huobi, Kraken, FTX, okex, gemini, crypto.com )
For our unique business model, this would open so many new windows and would benefit everyone from the company to the token holders.

Long story short, i think we should focus on listings sooner than later.
If i had the option to obtain IDLE on a good CEX or a few options, i would choose those over UNI/SUSHI personally.

Curious to see how this discussion goes!

(EDIT - LOOK TIME STAMP - even with liquidity now on sushi, we dont get much traction or volume still - Larger exchanges will definitely bring more awareness & volume potential)

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I am for getting listed on a CEX and agree with @JonnyReid on focusing on quality T1 exchanges.
A lot of the reasons being similarly to @JonnyReid also but to reiterate:

Pros

  • Increased liquidity
  • Increased project exposure >> Increase TVL + $IDLE
  • Attract media coverage (DefiPulse, Defiant, etc.) >> Increase TVL + $IDLE
  • Positive signal to market
  • Increased momentum = Increased motivation
  • Less prohibitive entry for buying $IDLE >> Increase accessibility >> Increase community >> Increase $IDLE
  • Increased $IDLE >> Increased Ecosystem Fund >> More innovation

Cons

  • Shorter term pump and $IDLE volatility
  • Possible detraction from other initiatives on the roadmap

I think the potential short term price spike and volatility will be far outweighed by the longer effect of having increased accessibility and volume. The Messari report focuses on the 5-day movement, however, IDLE (and its holders) are here for the longer run so this will be nearly a blip but quite possibly a positive impetus towards greater reach and exposure for larger TVL inflows.

So… In short, let’s do it!!!

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I am also in favour of getting IDLE listed on a GOOD centralised exchange, for all the reasons pointed out by @JonnyReid @RTP2016 -

  • Raise the profile of Idle
  • Reduce cost of trading
  • Deeper liquidity with more options for community
  • Onboard new community unfamiliar w/Dex usage

My only watch out is that I don’t want to see IDLE on multiple low level exchanges diluting liquidity across multiple platforms.

Our ideal outcome in my view would be COINBASE, but would also support other T1s like Binance / Kraken / Huobi. I also do think there are some good Tier 2 solutions like Kucoin, BitMax etc.

Overall, I think it is time to Idle to “step up” and accelerate and start to play with the big DeFi kids. And getting on mainstream exchanges is a key part of that journey.

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Agreed on the listing with people above and leaning heavily towards listing it. At this moment, it’s probably the low-hanging fruit to grow IDLE and take it to the next phase. And that is presenting the project to the wider audience. It would increase exposure and credibility (as I believe having it listed is a vote of confidence from the perspective of an average person). And should probably done ASAP, as DeFi is ganing more and more popularity, and there aren’t that many DeFi protocols listed on CEX-es as there probably will be in a year.

The volatility risk isn’t really a problem, as we are experiencing volatility as is. If anything, it should increase stability as more people partake and become holders of IDLE and stand to lose something. Also, it’s bound to attract even more talent to the community long-term.

Agreed with @Coinballers that some caution is needed in selection of CEX-es where it’s to be listed.

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The pros of listing on a CEX just outweigh the cons. Besides price action and deep liquidity, exposure is what IDLE needs right now and that can easily be fixed by listing on a tier 1 CEX.

I’m up for a CEX listing.

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I’m in favor to getting listed on a cex exchange. Completely agree with @JonnyReid and the other community members.
We need more exposure and as soon as possible.
We have to catch this bullrun Together.
Binance listing at the right Time could be amazing :+1:

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I’m also in favor of listing on CEX’s but only if it doesn’t require massive token gifts/payments in order to list. I believe that if we build a decent project then CEX’s will want to list this token rather than us chasing them.

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CEX listing is a positive thing, especially if it doesn’t divert too many resources. I don’t think it’s something that makes or breaks a DeFi protocol, but it’s nice to have. Another tick off the “Maturity” checklist.

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:raised_hands: First of all, thank you for your answers and thoughts on the pros and cons of this kind of initiative

I think it is now clear from these replies that the community sentiment is leaning towards having $IDLE listed on CEXs.

The Pilot League will now be able to work on potential opportunities that relate to being listed on CEXs :rocket:

:hourglass: Stay tuned

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Great to hear! I think this is definitely a positive step in the right direction :clap:

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Very good to hear!..

When can we expect more info/news about this…
@emixprime , any time frame for that?

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Awesome! the opportunity to be listed on a good quality CEX would only favor IDLE ecosystem in the long term image

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At the moment we don’t have a time frame that we can share, in the meantime, I can tell you that we are actively working on the topic and that it is part of our priorities right now :grin:

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So pleased & relieved to see its a high priority.
Bright future ahead for IDLE

Proud to be here so early!

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Hey, just wanted to add this here. Prompted by the latest video from Coin Bureau about the “Coinbase effect”. Also, this layman article sums it up nicely:

A report released last month by the crypto research firm Messari found that assets listed on Coinbase had an average gain of 91% in the five days after the listing announcement. That said, the number masks a wide variance in outcomes that is severely skewed by a few outliers. Performance ranged from a 32% drop to a 645% gain. After removing the outliers, Messari found that the average gain was 29%.

This article goes into more depth.

Buy why I’m posting this, aside from the obvious positive efftect of listing the token on the CEX, is this:

It’s not just the price effect that matters. A Coinbase listing can open tokens to millions of new users — 56 million people had Coinbase accounts at the end of the first quarter.

That means, A LOT of people are going to reach idle.finance website, gov forum, discord, telegram.

I’d encourage to revisit all those, and improve them, before actually getting listed on CEX, as we will experience a huge spike in traffic. And we want the conversion rate to improve. That is the % of people who, after visiting one of the channels, become investors (or stakers).
If for example 1% of visitors become Idle investors, increasing that percentage to 2% is going to be significant. There is no doubt that the listing will greatly increase the number of users, stakers, and the price of Idle. But there’s a huge opportunity cost if conversion rate improvements didn’t take place. Meaning, the “missed potential gains”. Worse yet, the opportunity cost wouldn’t even be measured, and we wouldn’t even be aware of it, as that scenario didn’t even happen in that case so there’s nothing to compare it with. But, the opportunity cost is real.

We’ll get a huge short-term boost in traffic, and we should be prepared for that with activities I posted about before (the boost not just from listing on CEX-es, but any other PR activity, but I’m pointing that out specifically before getting listed on CEX, as that reach increase will be huge compared to other potential activities). Besides improvements on the front-end of the website, the advanced analytics should probably be set up, as well as improvements to perhaps Discord/Telegram groups. To get them more organized and be ready for an insurgence of incoming users (ex. of good Discord channel I personally like is the Index Coop discord group). Ranging from organizational improvements, support on those channels, and perhaps some other stuff I might be missing. But those might be minor improvements.

Just putting it here, so there’s awareness that it should be done before getting a lot bigger exposure. And all those improvements are a process, and they will take time. So it could be taken into account while planning the CEX listing.

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