The surge in memecoin popularity in this crypto cycle has added extra pressure on crypto exchanges to weed out questionable projects and protect users, according to a crypto exchange executive.

“The team does a lot of due diligence on the founders of the project, who is involved, and what’s potentially on their roadmap,” crypto exchange Binance chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan told Cointelegraph at Aus Crypto Con 2024.

Community feedback and input

As for what is the X factor that gets a crypto token listed on Binance, Conlan said there is nothing "guaranteed.”

"A few different factors are considered by this secret research team,” Conlan said.

“Community feedback and input, as well as watching what community trends and insights are around this, are definitely important,” she added, dismissing the idea that hype alone drives listings.

Conlan said that memecoins have had a “lot of negative coverage” because of their lack of utility.

“But we know that there are up-and-coming memecoins that have that utility built in, which is really what we all need because we need that use case,” she explained.

‘Critical’ to keep the community involved

Conlan forecasted that the crypto community will “grow exponentially” over the next 18 to 24 months, which means there will be an even greater need to focus on crypto projects with real use cases:

“It is born and frivolous at the beginning, but if you want to keep the community involved, it is critical.”

“What we should be talking about more is the innovation that’s going to come out, like the innovation that’s been prepped in this bear cycle. What people are building,” she said.

Related: Solana memecoin trader turns $160 into $5.6M with viral token

Conlan’s comments on utility reflect a similar view to that of the former CEO of Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who recently shared his growing distaste for the memecoin ecosystem. 

In a Nov. 26 X post, he said that the memecoins are getting “a little” weird as opposed to being funny during their nascent stages.

“Let’s build real applications using blockchain,” CZ stated.

Despite the ongoing scams and rug pulls in the memecoin space, there have also been recent cases of users gaining extreme wealth.

On Nov. 27, Cointelegraph reported that a Solana-based memecoin trader turned a $160 investment into millions after buying tokens tied to a viral internet meme.

Magazine: Charles Hoskinson, Cardano and Ethereum – for the record