So, I talk about this everywhere and to everyone who will listen, but I will copy some relevant details here as it often gets murky in the repeating. Legal is a huge part of CEX exchange listing and it's a very different regulatory landscape from when Bitcoin was getting listed everywhere.... Arguably without Bitcoin there would be no CEXs period, but in most cases it really comes down to a combination of things that make us a difficult add, especially these days where EVM chains are almost instant no dev-overhead business endeavours, we are a coat/benefit/time deficit and so our listings often take longer. At current we're currently in the legal/due diligence stages with five large CEXs, and realistically, overall more volume will continue to make it easier to help out way some of the more difficult aspects such as no legal entity. I worked for about 7 months with Binance US to negotiate and do all the legal for a listing... And then.... Well! There's that regulatory landscape again.

Here's a long snip of some of the discussion that often comes up each time people sort of say 'well, we've given up on listings and the big whales want us not to get listed.' That really couldn't be much further from the truth but it helps to get more understanding of the sort of multifaceted challenge that we present in our current for to the biggest CEXs we're not currently listed with:

Market Making when combined with legal liability risks and development overhead

This is the thing making our lives a living hell, at current. We wonder how low cap alts and shitty PnDs rocket past us, or why our organic volumes aren't where we want them to be. In a perfect world, this type of service wouldn't be the basis for every coin's volume, but that's not the world we live in.

This is coming up right now because once again, after months of talks with a huge wallet integration- we got stonewalled again. I can talk my way into every meeting. I can get people excited about us. I can often find tricky ways to get around some of the worst legal issues and can almost always negotiate out of listing fees.

But more and more frequently, as new projects rise, and foundations splash out heavy cash to kickstart the baseline for other chain's marketcaps, I'm being told that the line where we will NOT be listed or integrated is based on our volume, and specifically, that we do not run or do not use a market maker.

I have two exchanges at current in limbo because they're waiting on some legal stuff which is in the process of being handled, but they've been very clear that they simply will not list if we do not have some form of MM.

Many CEXs have their own you can pay into, which is basically extortion, but there are many other outside options from buy in to lending based. I don't have a strong opinion on what we do. But I'm being very open and clear right now that this is actively a very real and very problematic stumbling block. And whether we like it or not, this is how coins that don't get seen move themselves up. It's a race to the bottom to get to the top. I well understand this doesn't fit with our ethos.

With all that being said, at some point we have to realize that we have to operate to the best of our abilities to really make a better web3, and play along with the others just enough to make sure we aren't left behind. This is becoming enough of a common theme (me being told "thanks, but hive is no longer/not on our roadmap" directly) that it's a good time for all of us to evaluate at what point we want to stick to this choice or if we want to try to use some of these tools to give ourselves a leg up and get people's eyes on us again. Price action and volume are big ways to do that, and when it comes to businesses who need to make a profit, we either have to pay them directly or show them we have the ability to drive fee generation, or they will keep showing us the door.

I'm actually always super proud when I can say that overall, pretty much all of our volume is driven by the general markets and they're all well aware that this is actually really abnormal in our space, which goes to show just how much sticking power we have- but especially these days, wallet integrations, website integrations, and exchange listings need to look out for themselves as much as I have to fight for Hive's needs- and they're getting very comfortable telling me, "you know what? thanks, but no thanks."

There's a constant stream of complaints that we don't get enough of the 'right' exchange listings, but the biggest difficulty apart from the legal stuff is our volume. So, we either have to work together to provide infra to start targeting DEXes, or we have to become a bit more flexible in what behaviour we want to be willing to put up with to give ourselves a shot in the arm on the charts to help us bring notice to the rest of what's happening here.

As mentioned, even though our setup is small, easy and costs little, these wallets and exchanges won't consider even looking twice at us if they see there's no money to be made at all... so take the cost and dev deficit of adding a new protocol over a one click copy and paste style deployment of an EVM meme coin who'll pay to MM, they'll take the short run of crazy high fee profit over us, ever single time. And that's how you get chains like Tron being lauded as 'the next hot thing' for tokenization and getting added to literally every interface, exchange, wallet, and web3 service going while legitimate, battle tested longevity tech gets left out on the cold.

I think we'd be remiss to stand out here shivering forever knowing that every cycle that we slowly slip backwards and stagnate in terms of attention is something that we could potentially choose a few places to 'go along to get along' and really change, as volume and green trends tend to take on a life of thier own pretty quickly in our space.

It's less about what I want and more about making sure that a lot of our biggest accounts who have strong opinions on guiding the overall ethos and sentiment of the chain are informed about what's happening... Which is basically that some of the big players we have been chasing are getting really comfortable saying 'no, not viable for our roadmap' to us where they used to say 'soon :tm:'

Any time we get far enough to get expectation number and pre-integration approval, it comes with an NDA, which is standard from any of the bigger exchanges. For example, Bitfinex's head of listings has told me directly in a call, with a few witnesses that while they love the idea of us, there will be no movement forward on listing until an MM is secured and provided to them for review (or they will recommend us an 'investor level' one,) because we do not meet the volume and needs of the bulk of their clientele.

We don't currently have any potential listings who have not agreed to waive their listing fee, so just to clarify these are MM services, which usually amount to locking up X amount of token with them, or with another outfit, as secured and guaranteed liquidity.

Depending on the type of MM/liquidity provider, how they make their money differs - either they skim off the top of every trade after you give them lots and lots of coins to work with so there are lots and lots of trades to skim off of, they take a large amount for themselves period as upfront payment and then just trade with what's left with a rough guarantee to hit certain targets, or in the case of an exchange depending on the player-- the trust aspect is much 'better' but of course you're handing them a pile of your own reserves to literally trade profitably against you with.

In the case of ANY MM option, it would need to likely be funded by a proposal, so the numbers would obviously never go without some form of community approval. However, right now, the vast majority of people in here are dead set against ever playing this game at all, which it's becoming time to broach the wider discussion. I can absolutely chase this down with aggression if we want to start collecting options and being more informed.

Basically, we just have to get over the mindset hurdle of 'do we want to play into this aspect of the industry?' because that's our first step. It is gross, and we don't always want to spend, but the flip side is why would people buy Hive directly on an exchange with poor liquidity when they can buy or sell literally anything else with more flexibility and then swap in only when needed, etc? The answer currently is, they just won't, and don't. So a new exchange, or especially multi-chain wallet integrations, look at relatively no one buying and go, 'why should I care?' It's a question we have to mull over a bit as part of our cycle planning, basically.

Kraken we've even had community members who work there (in non-listing positions) do internal presentations and we can't get a listing consideration. Volume, and our legal and corporate structure are the biggest blockers for them. I usually do the diligence paperwork about three times a year. I have negotiated and am in the process of acquiring finalized, fairly low pricedHive specific legal opinions from two acceptable countries (we were listed with Steem documents, and I use Steemit inc's legal opinions in all new listings. Embarrassing, but also not ideal for US compliant exchanges) which I hope will really help on that front.

Coinbase is much the same- exchanges that operate in the US are under HELLA scrutiny, so they are much, much, MUCH more unforgiving of listing applications that do not have doxxed team, corporate address and legally culpable representatives/structures, which of course is one of the absolute hardest things for us. It's not a straight up impossible thing, nor is it solely money or solely legal... it's the awful triple threat kiss of death that we are low volume so taking a risk on us isn't a windfall of profit, we're almost completely anon and no one can be pointed to on paper as the person to sue if we do something shitty so they can pass along any legal accountability, and that we are an entirely different protocol that requires the memo-database setup that means that they have to actually do work that we don't pay listing fees to cover to properly integrate us instead of just using their existing EVM code to add every single new token that gets pooped out.

I'm bound and determined to get them, which is why I keep starting these convos and I'm trying to get around some of these blockers (like the legal opinions), it's just one ridiculously long slog that needs something to give to help up our attractiveness. Volume is some of the lowest hanging fruit.