Cryptocurrency Exchange Listings (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

This extended abstract summarizes the essence of [Li et al., 2025], which studies the listing decisions as well as listing performances on cryptocurrency exchanges, and investigates potential strategic incentives and their interactions with regulatory exposures. The authors first present a case study comparing cryptocurrency listings on the largest and more regulated U.S. exchange, Coinbase, and the largest but less regulated global exchange, Binance. They find that: Regarding listing performance, while cryptocurrency listings on both exchanges see significantly positive short-term returns, the more regulated Coinbase sees significantly higher listing returns than the less regulated Binance; Regarding listing choices, while both exchanges tend to list cryptocurrencies with more GitHub development activities, conflicts of interests arise when exchanges list cryptocurrencies that their venture capital arms have previously invested in. Specifically, the authors find the less regulated Binance being more likely to list its self-invested coins with inferior fundamentals, and the apparent agency friction does not seem to be corrected by market forces. To obtain external validity of the lessons learned from the top two exchanges, the authors further construct an exchange regulation index on a larger sample of 80 qualified exchanges, and confirm the relation between stricter exchange regulations and higher short-term listing returns, controlling for cryptocurrency and exchange attributes.