The Binance Effect is back - with a twist

Yesterday, garry wrote a great insight about Cortex topping our list of emerging social trends in a...peculiar way.

Cortex gained over 150%, reaching a 4-month high $0.146 in a span of just 24 hours. However, the coin only started gaining traction on crypto social media...4 days after the pump.

A few hours after garry published his article, another coin - AERGO - made it on the top of our Emerging Trends list, in a weirdly similar fashion:

What in the world...what could have caused this massive, eye-watering discovery lag for not one - but two coins?

Well, good people of crypto town, what we have here is a two-pronged, Frankenstein version of the Binance effect.

We covered the now-classic Binance AMA pumps multiple times in the past. If you’re first hearing about it, Binance started organizing project AMAs on their main Telegram channel back in late February, with the goal of highlighting notable teams and coins relevant to the exchange.

Their first AMA, you might remember, hosted none other than Justin Sun, who answered questions on Tron and gave away 1M BTT during the session.

Since then, we’ve seen multiple coins make our Emerging Trends list during or ahead of their Binance AMA, often with a sizable price pump to boot. It happened to Neblio, Enjin, WTC, Holo and several other lucky few over the past 9 months.

What we’re seeing this week on the CTXC and AERGO charts, however, is a combination of not one - but TWO bona fide Binance effects, working in tandem.

The initial price pump happened on November 14th, as Binance announced the above two coins - AERGO and CTXC, have been selected for Binance's third Community Coin Vote :

Basically, whichever coin gets more votes will get listed on Binance, which funnily prompted an immediate rally for both of them: Aergo improved by 51% over the next 24 hours, while CTXC grew a whopping 119% in the same time.

So a classic case of the listing pump here, perhaps made a bit more notable by the fact that only one of these coins will actually get listed.

Binance effect #1 - check.

But while the announcement instantly pumped both coins, it didn’t seem to get the crowd all too excited. There was a tiny spike in mentions of ‘CTXC’ and AERGO’ on crypto social media on November 14th, where Sanbase recorded about 15 new mentions for each coin. In other words, nothing to write home about.

So why the sudden burst in crowd interest in CTXC and AERGO almost 4 and 5 days later, respectively?

Enter Binance effect #2. As the coins already started to consolidate (or, you know, violently dump in case of AERGO) after the initial pump, Binance shrugged and decided to bring out the Pumpmaster 3000 itself - project AMA:

CTXC went first, holding their Ask-me-Anything session on November 19th, the day before AERGO, which is why Cortex made our emerging trends list first.

After consolidating for the past 36 hours (Nov 17th-18th), CTXC started to rally again ahead of the AMA, which correlates precisely with the biggest spike in coin’s social volume: over 500 new mentions of “cortex” and “ctxc”:

The AMA helped guide the second leg of CTXC’s rally, with the coin finally peaking about 10 hours after. The coin has been in proverbial freefall since.

Next comes AERGO, whose own AMA was announced and occured a day later - November 20th:

Between the initial pump and the AMA announcement, AERGO lost almost 90% of the gains made over the last 5 days. Then, like some kind of CZ-powered magic, the coin ventured on another upward trek ahead of the AMA, bolstered by a huge spike in social volume (over 400 new mentions of ‘AERGO’):

Almost mirroring CTXC’s own experience since, the coin peaked several hours after the AMA was concluded, dumping more than 20.6% since.

Binance effect #2 - check.

For what it's worth, the Community Vote ends in about 9 hours, and while it's pretty clear already who's going to win (CTXC), I think it's fair to say both coins have already won:

So there you have it, folks. For all of you who were worried the industry is maturing too quickly, sprinting past the good ole' speculative rallies and into the promised land of cogent utility and mass adoption, and will soon leave all the degens behind - don’t fret: Binance pumps are alive and well.