BNB Chain’s announces upgrade to $100m incentive program

BNBChain is upgrading its $100 million incentive program to feature direct token acquisition.

According to an update, the change in approach follows ecosystem feedback that showed the initial liquidity program for memecoins, decentralized finance, artificial intelligence and gaming tokens among other projects on BNB Chain was not as effective as expected. 

BNB Chain initially announced the $100 million program aimed at incentivizing centralized exchanges to list native BNB Chain tokens in March 2024.

The goal was to strengthen on-chain liquidity and to solidify market foundations, with projects earning rewards for listing on CEXs in a tiered approach. Top exchanges included Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, while tier two and three consisted of Kraken, Bybit, OKX and Bitget, MEXC, Gate.io, KuCoin, Crypto.com  respectively. Rewards ranged from $10k to up to $500k.

According to BNB Chain, feedback after a three-week pilot showed this model wasn’t working, which is what prompted the change. Rather than the incentives aimed at through listings, the BNB Chain now plans to support high-performing projects via direct investments.

Projects with a market cap  of over $1 million and average daily active traders exceeding 300 or total value locked of $20 million can enter a “qualified pool.” Other metrics, including security, will apply, with selected projects seeing BNB Chain Foundation purchase $100,000 worth of tokens. 

“BNB Chain Foundation also keeps the flexibility to decide when to purchase tokens and how to handle the purchased tokens,” the platform wrote.

This initiative eyes tokens that qualify as being 100% BNB Chain native, with this tag extended to those that have successfully migrated from other chains. The blockchain has seen an influx of new projects as developer activity spikes across DeFi, AI, web3 gaming, and memes.

Some of these new launches include infra project Quex Tech, payments solution Crypto Use, AI-powered web3 launchpad BNB4.AI and Market.Win, an oracle data-based prediction market.