Binance Alpha Points Gameplay Overtakes on the Inside Track, Sweeping 90% of the Web3 Wallet Market

Original Article Title: "Binance Alpha Points 'Arena': A Web3 Wallet War where a Whale Devours 90% of Market Share"

Original Article Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, Binance's Web3 wallet, with its innovative 'Alpha' gameplay, has caused a huge wave in the Web3 wallet market, rapidly gaining market share, occupying 90% of the territory, and attracting attention. Behind this phenomenon is its clever points airdrop mechanism, strategic adjustments by competitors, and the chain reaction and significant recovery of the BNB Chain ecosystem triggered by it.

How did Binance Alpha cleverly utilize market gaps and user psychology to achieve an 'eating up the market' expansion? Beneath the surface of the 'gold rush,' what pressures of 'burnout' do users face, and what are the real benefits? Is this merely a short-lived traffic frenzy, or a model innovation sufficient to lead an industry revolution?

Exploiting Gaps and Points Gameplay: Whale Devouring the Wallet Market

Since its launch, Binance's Web3 wallet market share has shown explosive growth. According to Dune data, as of May 12, 2025, Binance's Web3 wallet accounted for as high as 95.7% of the total transaction volume of all tracked Web3 wallets, ranking first. This marks a significant leap from 54.1% in March 2025. On May 10, 2025, Binance's wallet reached a peak daily trading volume of over $9.3 billion. On April 22, this figure was only $76 million.

BNB Chain's ecosystem has also been boosted by Alpha. The TVL of the BNB Chain has also seen a significant increase, growing by over $6 billion from early 2024 to May 2025. This growth is inseparable from Binance Alpha. According to official data, among the top 20 tokens by trading volume, half are BSC native projects. Among the top 10 tokens with new active users, 90% are BSC tokens, with 6 projects having over 20% share of new users. On-chain BSC data has also seen significant growth: approximately 4.3 million new users in the past week, over 1 million new addresses for two consecutive days, and over 2 million active addresses. The total number of unique BSC addresses has reached 552 million. From these data points, Binance Alpha is becoming a key engine for the activity and capital inflow of the BNB Chain.

It is worth noting that the sharp increase in Binance Web3 Wallet's market share coincided closely with the time when competitor OKX paused its DEX aggregator service. On March 17th this year, OKX announced the suspension of its DEX product aggregator trading service, after which OKX's wallet market share plummeted from about 50% to 3.6%. Almost simultaneously, on March 18th, Binance announced the launch of Binance Alpha2.0 test version, integrating Alpha trading directly into the Binance trading platform.

A clear shift is also reflected in the data. From March 10th to March 17th, in one week, Binance Wallet's transaction volume market share was only 8.3%, growing to 50.2% by March 24th. It became the wallet application with the highest market share.

On April 17th, BinanceAlpha announced the upcoming launch of the GM token and initiated an airdrop plan. BinanceAlpha's search index began to rise rapidly, and its trading volume also showed a noticeable change. The trading volume from April 17th to April 24th reached $184 million, more than tripling from the previous week's $57.94 million. As the points-based gameplay gained popularity on social media, the trading volume for the week ending May 5th reached $1.574 billion, a 27-fold increase from the week before the airdrop gameplay was launched. This surge also propelled the entire on-chain wallet transaction volume to break through the historical record, reaching $1.876 billion.

Alpha Users' "Sweet" and "Burden"

This explosive growth can be traced back to the points-based airdrop gameplay of Binance Alpha. The Binance Alpha points system is a complex mechanism designed by Binance to incentivize user participation, screen active users, and distribute airdrops or TGE qualifications. It mainly allocates points based on users' transaction volume and balance on Binance Alpha, and then determines which users can participate in each airdrop event by setting a points threshold.

However, with the surge in user numbers, this points-based gameplay is becoming a new battleground for competition. The key evaluation metrics of this points mechanism are asset balance and daily transaction volume.

Asset balances are divided into four levels. Total asset value $100 to <$1,000: 1 point per day; total asset value $1,000 to <$10,000: 2 points per day; total asset value $10,000 to <$100,000: 3 points per day; total asset value $100,000 and above: 4 points per day.

Regarding transaction volume, purchasing $2 worth of tokens: earns 1 point; purchasing $4 worth of tokens: earns 2 points; purchasing $8 worth of tokens: earns 3 points; purchasing $16 worth of tokens: earns 4 points; purchasing $32 worth of tokens: earns 5 points. Subsequently, for every doubling of the purchase transaction volume, an additional 1 point is awarded (for example, purchasing $64 earns 6 points, purchasing $128 earns 7 points, and so on). Typically, it is considered a relatively cost-effective choice to transact $32 in a single day to obtain 5 points.

Furthermore, this type of point system is calculated on a 15-day rolling basis, meaning that users cannot achieve these points in a single effort; they must consistently engage in transactions to maintain their point levels.

There are several relatively apparent attractions of this point system for users. Firstly, the rules are clear, allowing users to predict the number of points they can earn based on their own strategies to reach the airdrop threshold. Secondly, there is virtually no first-mover advantage under this point system, as later users can equally participate and achieve similar point levels to those who joined earlier.

However, as competition intensifies, the point threshold for participation is constantly increasing. From the initial criteria of a $50 transaction volume or $100 asset balance standard to the latest project DOOD raising the requirement to 168 points. Based on this calculation, a new user needs to maintain a daily point amount of over 11.2 points to participate in this airdrop. According to estimates, users who meet the criteria need to hold over $1000, conduct transactions of over $1024 daily to accumulate enough for the airdrop. Factoring in on-chain fees, transaction slippage costs, the total cost could exceed $60. Relative to the final airdrop value of $81, approximately a 35% return can be achieved. However, one must also consider the opportunity cost of the $1000 principal, with the return over 15 days being roughly 2% compared to the total capital investment. This return rate may not be as high as a token's price surge at once, but it is relatively stable. Therefore, many rug pull studios choose to batch create accounts and participate in mass operations due to this stability.

Is it a Traffic Party or a Paradigm Revolution?

Is Binance Alpha really a new type of airdrop exploitation?

In DOOD's airdrop event announcement, the user threshold was disclosed. A total of 30,271 accounts met the requirements. Calculating based on approximately $81 of airdrop per account, the total airdrop scale of this event is around $2.48 million. The address data for other token airdrop events were not disclosed, so specific amounts cannot be determined, but the estimated scale should be similar. For a project's airdrop, a multimillion-dollar scale does not seem high, especially when compared to the several billion-dollar airdrop scales of projects like Hyperliqued, Movement, and even not as high as a single whale's airdrop amount.

However, from the perspective of publicity and the transaction data brought to the ecosystem, the input-output ratio of Binance Alpha is undoubtedly impressive. Essentially, this is similar to the trading mining craze that was popular a few years ago. With Binance's significant impact, many other trading platforms are also launching similar gameplay.

On May 7, Bybit announced the launch of the WEB3 Points Program, where users can earn WEB3 points by completing tasks such as holding cryptocurrency assets, conducting exchange transactions, and inviting friends.

On May 5, the OKX trading platform announced a major functional upgrade to its self-hosted wallet OKX Wallet's built-in DEX Aggregator. Several new features were added, including on-chain market analysis, smart fund tracking, and Meme mode. As of May 11, OKX Wallet's market share has rebounded to 8.5%.

As trading platforms compete to capture the wallet market share, some traditional wallet applications have become unwitting targets. In June 2023, MetaMask's transaction volume market share could reach over 60%. By May 2025, it has dropped to only 2.9%, and Binance's Trust Wallet is facing a similar predicament.

Overall, Binance Alpha has ignited a new wave of frenzy through its points system, similar to early liquidity mining on trading platforms, stimulating trading activity through potential incentives. On one hand, it serves as an effective tool for Binance Wallet, BSC, and other ecosystem products to gain market share and increase user activity. Through carefully designed point and airdrop mechanisms, it has successfully attracted a large number of users and funds, even to some extent eroding the market share of competitors. There is a clear positive correlation between the recovery of the BNB Chain and the promotion of Alpha, forming an "Alpha-BNB Chain flywheel effect."

On the other hand, for users, the 15-day rolling points, point burning mechanism, and continuously rising airdrop thresholds force users into a continuous high-intensity trading "Alpha treadmill." The true net income is often difficult to accurately measure, and users face many hidden costs such as slippage, gas fees, etc. For many ordinary users, the "gold rush" may gradually evolve into a "sweatshop" as a result of this model's internal looping effect, which is spreading from users to potentially between trading platforms. If the input-output ratio of such airdrops falls below the profit line, today's lively scene may quickly cool off in a short time.

However, for the industry, there are indeed many aspects of Binance Alpha's mechanism design that are worth learning from, especially for projects with expected airdrops. Binance Alpha can be considered a classic case of achieving a lot with little money.

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