Most cryptocurrency exchange platforms do not openly advertise their publication fees, although they are known to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions, in some cases.
The larger the exchange, the higher the price that must be paid to take advantage of its source of liquidity and the army of existing users. Business Insider reports on the founders of an ICO to those who requested between US $ 50,000 and US $ 1 million for having their token on the list.
The CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, questioned these figures, and also defended the contribution rates, tweeting that "most of the investment banks charge 7% nothing more for signing an initial public offering agreement", by way of comparison.
It is not only the centralized exchanges that can keep the ICO hostage with high contribution rates, the same can be said of the main mobile crypto wallets.
An altcoin developer told news.Bitcoin.com that they wanted to charge a fee of US $ 3.5 million for their integration with a popular mobile wallet. They declined.Platforms such as Bittrex and Bitfinex claim that they do not charge a publication fee, although some people question it.
With platforms that require ICOs to sign highly restrictive NDAs (privacy agreements) before the list of tokens can even be discussed, it is difficult to find firm figures.
A license to print money
It is rumored that it can cost up to US $ 1 million to appear in Binance, with the only exception of the month's community currency, for which users of the platform vote.(One source has placed the Binance publication fee closer to US $ 350,000, but expresses uncertainty about whether it is a single or annual fee).
For many altcoins and ICOs, the cost of a high liquidity league entry is too much, limiting these projects to smaller exchanges such as Gate.io and Tradesatoshi.Romano, developer of Viacoin, did not confirm how much he paid to list VIA in Binance, but admitted that had it not been for a successful career as a crypto trader he would not have been able to pay for it.
Despite all its associations with decentralization, cryptocurrencies still depend to a large extent on centralized platforms.
It is not essential to obtain support from the major stock exchanges and the main hardware and software portfolios, but without such adoption the altcoins run the risk of being marginalized and inaccessible to the masses.
It is one of the many paradoxes within the cryptographic space: for cryptography to be massively adopted, it must be on the main platforms. The exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase are the cryptouniverse's Facebook; virtual monopolies with the power to make or break projects.