On Sunday (March 24), Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”), the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, explained the motivation behind Binance Launchpad’s new lottery-style token sale format, and addressed some of the most common questions/concerns raised by the crypto community.

As we reported earlier, around 08:44 UTC on March 24, Binance sent out the following tweet to announce a new lottery format for the next project on Binance Launchpad.

Unfortunately, not everyone loved the change from the old “first-come-first-served system” to the new “lottery format”, with the main complaint being that this new format discriminated against “poorer” investors since the “number of tickets you can claim depends on the amount of BNB you hold over a 20-day period in a Binance account leading up to the day of the lottery, up to a maximum of 5 tickets per eligible account” and your 20-day minimum BNB balance must be at least 100 BNB (worth approximately $1700 at current BNB prices) in order to be able to claim any lottery tickets.

Here were some of the comments by the critics of this new model:

In order to address this criticism, the Binance CEO took to Twitter around 90 minutes after the Binance Twitter account made the announcement to explain that he was willing to listen to all of the feedback and consider making adjustments to the proposed new sale format for Binance Launchpad:

CZ decided to focus his attention on the following two complaints/concerns:

  • No way for people holding less than 100 BNB to participate, thereby limiting the platform to those with relatively large BNB balances (the “whales”).
  • Some “whales” could get around the “maximum of 5 lottery tickets” rule by using multiple Binance accounts.

Here were CZ’s thoughts on these two issues:

And finally, in response to those who had suggested that the 20-day minimum BNB balance should be 50 instead of 100, this is what CZ had to say: