BNB Tops DeFi Rankings? CoinMarketCap Urgently Removes, Clarifies: Human Error

In March of this year, Binance officially acquired the cryptocurrency data platform CoinMarketCap (CMC). Despite the initial backlash from the crypto community, user concerns have eased over time, especially after a detailed response from the founder Zhao Changpeng. However, CMC faced another issue on the 23rd when users discovered that they had mistakenly listed the BNB token as the top DeFi coin, a mistake that was promptly rectified.

Following the Bitcoin mining reward halving, the cryptocurrency market has become dominated by DeFi projects, sparking a trend with liquidity mining and a total locked value of $3.5 billion. This shift has somewhat overshadowed traditional exchanges, with the stablecoin trading protocol Curve surpassing established exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase in trading volume on the 20th.

As exchanges play more of a supporting role, Binance made a move by announcing yesterday the integration of Chainlink's oracle solution into its "Binance Smart Chain," paving the way for DeFi expansion. While Binance's move into DeFi is seen as positive news, CMC's misclassification of BNB as the top DeFi token drew criticism.

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BNB Token Controversy

Since the acquisition by CoinMarketCap (CMC), a series of changes have been implemented. In May, they announced the inclusion of "liquidity index" and "website traffic" as ranking criteria. At the beginning of June, they launched a "chat group" feature, and by the end of June, over 40 DeFi tokens were listed. However, on the 23rd of this month, there was an apparent human error where the platform token BNB was mistakenly listed as the top DeFi token, which was promptly removed after users raised concerns on Twitter.

Twitter user @cryptonator1337 tweeted, "Everyone knows that there is a #DeFi token ranking on CMC now, guess who is number one?"

Yes, it's BNB. Everyone needs to understand how shameless Binance is.

BNB was removed from the list a few hours later. When contacted for a response on this incident, CoinMarketCap spokesperson told BeInCrypto:

"People work at CMC just like all of us. Adding BNB to the DeFi list was a human error, and we corrected it as soon as it was brought to our attention. We reiterate our commitment to providing accurate and relevant data while maintaining neutrality towards our parent company."

The spokesperson mentioned that CMC aims to have a stricter definition of DeFi because in a broad sense, all cryptocurrencies can achieve value transfer without permission in a decentralized manner. If such a standard is applied, the DeFi token list would be meaningless, so they aim to limit the selection criteria as much as possible.

Controversy Over CMC's Ranking Criteria Since Acquisition

Due to the immense influence of Binance, since the acquisition in March, the neutrality of CMC has been continuously questioned, leading various data platforms to try to replace this top-ranking website. To optimize rating standards, CMC made a series of updates:

• May 8: Added liquidity index to ranking criteria
• May 13: Added website traffic index
• May 29: Added credibility index, updated spot market trading pair rankings
• June 29: Listed 40 DeFi tokens
• June 11: Launched "chat group" feature
• July 17: Released news media section

Despite making many changes, Binance, with its vast influence, has faced criticism from the crypto community after acquiring CMC, especially as it soared from eleventh to first place in exchange rankings after the introduction of new rating systems.

Furthermore, looking back at reports from earlier this month, CMC launched a DeFi token ranking list by the end of June, but its main competitor, CoinGecko, had already introduced DeFi and liquidity ratings.

Therefore, although CMC still holds a massive user advantage, with website traffic even four times higher than CoinGecko, continuous low-level errors like mistakenly ranking BNB as the top DeFi token could potentially lead to a large-scale platform migration by users in the future.