An Open Letter to Coinmarketcap | KickEX exchange

Hello, respected Coinmarketcap!

I am the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange KickEX, which has been listed in your catalog since 2020, and I want to share my disappointment and disillusionment with how you have changed just a couple of years after being acquired by Binance.

Once upon a time, you aimed to make the market better, fairer, and more transparent. You were true enthusiasts and created an amazing project that all crypto enthusiasts used. You were always kind and open to those who, like us, were building our complex industry from scratch. You were pioneers, just like us, and it was truly great.

But after being acquired by an industry leader, everything changed. Fair play ceased to be fair, impartiality disappeared, and that’s disappointing.

Not too long ago, after the collapse of Terra and then FTX, many companies — even giants in our market — went bankrupt. We, a small exchange, also suffered, and only now have we managed to recover from the crisis. During this period, you changed the API, and only recently were we able to implement this necessary support. Imagine my surprise when you charged us $50,000 just to return us from “untracked listing” back to the catalog where we had been for two and a half years. The word “shock” doesn’t even begin to describe what we felt within our team. It’s shocking and “this can’t be happening,” “it must be a mistake.” However, as Aiden from your support responded, “Please review our last response — It explains our position clearly.” Quite rudely and arrogantly, which is even more disappointing.

Unfortunately, we are fundamentally not prepared to pay such amounts. What if you change the API again? What if someone decides to put us back into “unranked listing” for some reason? What if we change jurisdictions? $50,000, $50,000, $50,000… for 10 minutes of someone’s work in the support department? Is this what you once declared — “we aim to advance the industry, make the market more transparent and fair,” and so on?

We see the complete opposite here. A barrier to entry for new players in the market. Yes, we can afford it, but we cannot accept such an approach ourselves. And new players will no longer be included in your catalog, which is becoming non-public and designed exclusively for corporations willing to pay $50,000 for a change in a couple of lines in their company description or some other minor change that takes minutes but costs as much as an annual salary for an employee making that change. The Coinmarketcap rules state that these are prices for “priority service”, however, this is untrue: these are mandatory prices, and a free service with a longer execution time actually does not exist. I don’t understand how it’s possible to declare such values as “openness”, “transparency”, “honesty”, and “fairness” of the decentralized finance industry, while acting in this manner at the same time.

What do I see in all of this? Another attempt to monopolize the market by your new beneficiary — Binance. As a result, market transparency and competitiveness are reduced. Ultimately, those who you originally created your catalog for — users, traders, crypto enthusiasts — will suffer. Look, no previous attempt by Binance to monopolize the market has led to anything good: lawsuits, legal battles, criminal cases, license revocations. And now this contagion has spread to a service that was once an impartial beacon in the turbulent waters of the evolving crypto industry.

And one more thing. You exist because there are exchanges and those who create and develop the market. Showing such an attitude towards us, the ones who enable your existence, in the long run, will not lead to anything good. Karma is not a fantasy; it works. Think about it and remember why you created Coinmarketcap in the first place.

Best regards,

Anti Danilevski, founder of KickEX