Centralized exchanges often face a tough choice — prioritize due diligence or move fast to capture early trading opportunities.
The Trump token is a prime example.
Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, recalled on TheStreet Crypto Roundtable that she first heard about the token on a Saturday morning when it was trading at a $3 billion valuation
"If you look at Trump token, for example, I heard of that token in my Asia time Saturday morning, and that was when Trump was only trading at $3 billion valuation," she said. Initially, Bitget hesitated to list political tokens, but after observing a surge in trading volume, they reconsidered.
"We generally don’t want to list any politics-related token and that’s why we said no in that morning, but in the afternoon subsequently, we see lots of trading volume around the road and we started to think, yes, now we need to list that," Chen explained.
"By the time we listed that token, Trump was priced at about $15. When Binance listed Trump on their spot market, I think it was about $60 already. The highest price level of Trump in total was about $75," she added.
DEX traders had the advantage of buying Trump much earlier, while CEX users were left chasing higher prices.
Bridging the gap between CEX and DEX
"Bitget recommends about five tokens per day that we find on DEXes, which we grade from different aspects like transparency, fundamentals, and how popular it is, etc. These are some of the less known but we think high potential projects," Chen said.
Centralized exchanges are often slow to list tokens due to extensive internal decision-making processes.
"It’s not just like me and two guys next to me talking to each other. It’s a listing committee that we have at the company. And this listing committee has expertise from different areas and we want to look at this in a very holistic package," she explained.
Binance’s token listing process under fire
On Feb. 9, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, Binance’s co-founder and former CEO, also criticized the exchange’s token listing process, calling it “a bit broken” after the Test (TST) token debacle exposed flaws in how new listings are handled.
Binance accidentally revealed the name of TST — a test token used in a BNB Chain tutorial video — which led traders to speculate that it was an official listing. Within hours, TST surged to a $500 million market cap before crashing, highlighting how retail traders rush to buy tokens ahead of centralized exchange (CEX) listings.