Test Token Reaches $500 Million and Ends Up on Binance: What Happened
Date: 2025-02-11 Author: Gabriel Deangelo Categories: CRYPTO PAYMENTS
Despite repeated warnings from Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) about the test nature of the token, it rapidly gained popularity, and its capitalization reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
On February 6, the developers of BNB Chain, associated with the largest crypto exchange Binance, showed the process of creating a memecoin on the four.meme platform. The video included a few seconds of footage with the name of the token. After that, as CZ stated in X, Chinese traders began actively trading it, which led to a jump in capitalization to $500 million.
Zhao reported that the video was deleted a few hours after publication, and the wallet data containing 0.13% of the total volume of TST was also erased. He emphasized that no one from the BNB Chain or Binance team owns the token, and that TST itself was just a test tool for a video tutorial.
However, in the same message, he wished traders good luck and left a link to the token on four.meme. After that, the price of TST jumped by 4,000%, according to Geckoterminal. On February 8, Zhao published new comments in Chinese, causing another jump in the crypto asset's value. At its peak that same day, TST had grown by 25,000% since its first mention, reaching a market cap of $200 million.
The next morning on February 9, Binance announced the listing of TST on its spot trading platform. After that, its market cap exceeded $500 million, but soon the token's value fell by 65% from its peak.
Listing on Binance usually requires months of preparation, significant financial investments in marketing and liquidity. In the case of TST, less than three days passed from the token's appearance to the listing. Zhao commented on the situation, noting that he has never purchased memecoins himself, but acknowledges their popularity among the crypto community.
The listing process has raised doubts among traders. CZ expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that several hours passed between the announcement and the start of trading: “They announce and then add the asset four hours later. During this time, the price on decentralized exchanges (DEX) skyrockets, and traders sell on centralized platforms (CEX).” In his opinion, CEX should automatically add assets, like DEX does.
Not all X users believed in the randomness of what was happening. One of the commentators noted that each of CZ's explanations only fueled interest in the token: “Every post he made made the token even more popular. And then Binance suddenly added it to spot? Apparently, four months in prison did not teach anything.” The comment collected hundreds of likes and tens of thousands of views.
According to Coingecko on February 10, at 13:30 Moscow time, TST was trading at $0.18 with a market cap of $190 million.
Binance co-founder Yi Hee noted in an interview with Colin Wu that the listing of TST was in line with the strategy of attracting new users, as was the case with the "tap" tokens in Telegram. However, the analysis of new projects often slows down the process of entering the exchange.
