Former CEO BitMEX Arthur Hayes believes that the listing price on centralized exchanges is too high and advises new crypto projects to list their tokens on decentralized exchanges

Should you pay exchanges listing fees to give your token a better chance of growing? Are projects launching at valuations that are too high? We looked at a sample of 103 projects that listed in 2024 on major exchanges. This is by no means a complete analysis of all projects that listed in 2024, but it is a representative sample. I want to briefly talk about the cost of listing on CEX. The biggest problem with the current number of token launches is that the price is too high. This makes it nearly impossible to have a good launch, no matter which CEX wins the initial listing. Projects with too high an initial price are paying a huge amount of money in project tokens and stablecoins for the privilege of listing crap.
I want either the founders to stop paying fees and focus on getting more users, or the CEXs to drastically reduce their prices. There are three main ways CEXs extract money from projects:

• They charge a direct listing fee;
• They require a deposit that is refunded if the project is delisted;
• They set a certain amount of marketing expenses funded by the project on the platform.
  In general, each CEX listing team evaluates projects. The worse your project is, the higher the fee. As I always tell founders, if your project has few users, you need a CEX to dump your shit on the market. If your project has product-market fit and a healthy growing ecosystem of real users, you don’t need a CEX because your community will support the price of your token wherever it is listed.
  Binance charges up to 8% of the total token supply as a listing fee. Most other CEXs charge between $250,000 and $500,000 paid in stablecoins. Binance has come up with an ingenious strategy that requires projects to purchase BNB and deposit it. When/if the project is delisted, the BNB is returned. Binance requires up to $5,000,000 worth of BNB to be purchased and deposited. Most other CEXs require a deposit of $250,000 to $500,000 in stablecoins or CEX tokens. Binance requires projects to give away 8% of their token supply to Binance users through on-platform airdrops and other campaigns. Mid-priced CEXs require spending up to 3% of the token supply. At the very bottom, exchanges require marketing spend of $250,000 to $1 million, paid in stablecoins or project tokens. All told, listing on Binance can cost 16% of your token supply and a $5 million purchase of BNB. If Binance is not a major exchange, the project will still face almost $2 million in tokens or stablecoins. I am unhappy that the tokens' performance after launch is not enough to justify the project founders paying these fees.
  My advice to project founders: Make sure your users/token holders get rich as your project becomes successful. If you must, only do a small private seed round so you can build a product for a very limited use case. Then list your token. Since your product is far from finding true market fit, the FDV should be very low. This signals a few things to your users. First, it’s risky, which is why they’re getting in at such a low price. You won’t screw up, and your users will stick with you because they paid a paltry price to get into the game. But they believe in you.
  Second, it shows that you want your users to join you on your journey to wealth accumulation. This incentivizes them to tell everyone about your product or service. Because users know there’s a path for them to get rich if more people join the movement. Right now, many CEXs are under pressure due to the severe underperformance of the vast majority of their new listings, which is why they try to only accept “high quality” projects.
  However, it is very difficult to select only the best projects. Garbage in, garbage out. Each major CEX has its own preferred metrics that it considers to be the leading indicators of success. Generally speaking, a super young project will not meet their criteria. Oh well! There is such a thing as a decentralized exchange. On a DEX, creating a new trading market is permissionless.
  Imagine that your project has raised 1 million USD and wants to offer 10% of your token supply to the market. You create a Uniswap liquidity pool of 1 million USDe against 10% of your token supply. Click a button and let the automated market maker respond to the demand for your token in the market and set a clearing price. You do not have to pay any fees to do this. Now your dedicated users can instantly buy your token and if you have a truly engaged community. The token price will skyrocket. I want the projects we support to stop worrying about which CEX will take them and start worrying about their damn DAU.
  Original: https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/pvp