Binance announced on March 12 that its Alpha platform has implemented a new comprehensive token review framework that will aim to remove tokens that don’t meet certain quantitative and qualitative criteria.

The quantitative metrics include trading volume stability, liquidity depth, frequency of onchain transactions and distribution of tokenholders. The qualitative metrics include project team credibility, adherence to regulatory compliance, community popularity and more.

Tokens that don’t meet these standards will be removed from Binance Alpha, the announcement said.

Binance Alpha is a platform within the company’s Wallet service that highlights new and early-stage crypto projects that “may have the potential for growth,” according to a Binance article about the platform. The platform launched in December 2024 with the goal of showcasing five tokens per day.

According to CoinGecko, the Binance Alpha Spotlight coins have a market capitalization of $6.4 billion, with a 24-hour rise of 3.7% at the time of this writing and a trading volume of $1.4 billion.

Flood of new coins shaking up listing procedures

Crypto exchanges, including Binance, are retooling their listing process to account for the rise in tokens, which has boomed to over 10 million in the past three years and continues to grow. On Feb. 8, 2025, the total number of coins listed on CoinMarketCap was nearing the 11 million mark. At the time of this writing, the number listed has risen to 12.5 million.

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On March 9, Binance announced a new community vote mechanism to help determine what coins would be listed on the exchange. Under the new rules, users will be able to vote on which tokens to list or delist, although Binance still has final approval on what tokens will be listed.

Coinbase is rethinking its token listing procedures as well. In a Jan. 24 X post, the exchange’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, said, “We need to rethink our listing process at Coinbase, given there are ~1 million tokens a week being created now, and growing.”

Armstrong called for regulators to take a more pragmatic approach, adding that “it needs to move from an allow list to a block list and utilize customer reviews and automated scans of onchain data to help customers sift through.”

Many of the new tokens have come from the memecoin craze, which has seen a daily issuance of around 40,000 coins or more just on Solana from November 2024 to February 2025. However, the memecoin market has cooled as of late, with new launches on Pump.fun down 80% since its peak as of Feb. 27. 

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