Binance Eliminates WePower and Elastos from Listing after Voter ‘Manipulation’

Binance has just announced the results of its latest monthly coin listing competition. And the outcome has come as a shock to the project teams of both WePower and Elastos and their supporters.

In a press release published only a few hours ago, the Binance team controversially announced third-placed Zilliqa as the outright winner, citing that it was taking “a very serious stance against vote manipulation,” and that it was “voiding candidates that were found to have openly violated these principles.”

“What Principles?”

The contest, which allocates a prized listing on the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange to the project which registers the highest community vote, had concluded on Sunday, February 25th amid accusations of foul play. 

Both camps had overtly been running campaigns which offered financial incentives to their supporters to participate in its favour. Over 150,000 votes are thought to have been registered for the Elastos project, with WePower finishing second on 60,000, with their combined vote representing just under 90% of all votes cast. 

It was, therefore, a shock to both sides this morning to learn that Binance has eliminated their applications, preferring instead to hand a free listing – thought to cost anything up to $1 million USD –  to the third-placed Zilliqa project which had registered just over 20,000 votes. 

“There’s a serious problem with Binance’s approach here,” one WePower voter participant stated on its Telegram channel, “because they haven’t provided any guidelines about what is allowed and not allowed in the voting process.”

“We should ask for our money back,” an Elastos supporter stated, referring to the 0.1 BNB fee paid (c. $1 USD) by each voter to participate in the contest, and with the combined number of votes thought to have brought in up to a quarter of a million dollars in revenue for the Binance platform. 

The immediate result, at the time of writing, has been a 14% gain for the Zilliqa (ZIL) token price, and a fall of 19% and 7% respectively for WePower (WPR) and Elastos (ELA).