Nicholas Merten:
It’s very important, whether you’re invested in Substratum or not, to not look at this in a black and white way. This has little to nothing to do with the actual value of Substratum or SALT as a project. The fundamentals are completely separate from Binance doing this, in my opinion.
I don’t know much about SALT, so I’ll just speak about Substratum. The project’s fundamentals are not “completely separate” from Binance’s choice to delist SUB. The quality of Substratum’s management is fundamentally broken, and this is obvious from the missed deadlines, lackluster PR strategy, and the CEO’s inability to not overpromise. Furthermore, losing 99% of SUB trading volume effectively kills the network’s monetization model – it is indeed black and white. I’m not the only one who thinks this. Substratum’s own CMO has stated that the team is exploring monetization models that don’t require SUB.
If you actually look over the reasoning for why Binance delisted these coins, you can make a lot of arguments that SALT, a platform that has function where you’re actually able to put up your crypto into basically locking up your funds like most of these crypto lending platforms and earn interest off of it – it has been working. If you look at Substratum as a team – they have a full team, an office that I’ve been to multiple times and I’ve actually seen them coding and developing, and not to mention has broken through the firewall of three major nations that censor content from their citizens.
Terrible point. BitConnect also had a team and an office. I’m not saying Substratum is on the same level as BitConnect – that would be foolish. However, arguing for a project’s legitimacy by saying it has a team and office is not convincing. Regarding Substratum “br[eaking] the firewall of three major nations that censor content from their citizens,” that’s simply not true. It’s clear that DataDash has no clue how firewalls work.
Anyone can set up an instance of ShadowSocks or OpenVPN on an unblocked IP address and watch YouTube videos in China. This is not the same thing as “breaking through the firewall”. Considering Substratum hasn’t launched its production version with encryption, it’s much too early to state the project has managed to bypass the security infrastructure of nation states. A more accurate description of the current situation would be “Substratum has managed to route data in and out of China because the government doesn’t give a s*** about blocking the IP addresses of Substratum’s nodes.” By the way, blocking nodes on the Substratum network is easy.
The problem is I think their delisting process was really unprofessional. It’s one thing to eventually have to announce to the public that you’re delisting a project – in this case, that’s understandable. But to not give the team any fair warning or reasoning as to why that’s happening, as they do it or beforehand, is extremely unprofessional.
I think Binance handled this extremely professionally. There is literally zero upside to informing a project about a delisting before it happens. Humans are greedy, and this would undoubtedly result in insider trading. Binance has no reason to be associated with assisting a to-be-delisted project with insider trading – there is too much at stake.