Binance Alpha points farming: 1,700 wallets traded $4.8 billion of a $2 million token.

01 · A Friday on BNB ChainThree buys, $65,536.30

On Friday, September 11, a wallet on BNB Chain bought a small token called quq with USDT, in a PancakeSwap pool. Eight seconds later it sold every token back. It bought again with exactly the USDT that sale had returned, and sold again. The third buy was smaller, just enough to take the day's buying past $65,536, by 30 cents.

The whole minute cost the wallet about $13. It was no one-off. On almost every day it bought quq that month, its buys stopped at the same line, within a dollar above it.

In our data, the whole token was worth $1.78 million at that moment, and its hourly price never put it above $1.8 million all month. On September 23, Binance's Alpha list gave its liquidity as about $1.5 million. Each dollar that went in came straight back out, so the same money was counted again and again. Market cap is the value of all the tokens, while volume counts every trip.

That number, 65,536, is sixteen twos multiplied together. On Binance Alpha, a day of buying that size earns sixteen points.

02 · The pointsBuys count, sales do not

Binance Alpha is Binance's list of small, early tokens that users can buy through Binance Wallet or the Binance exchange. Buying them earns Alpha points, which decide who gets into Binance's token launches and Alpha airdrops. Points are spent when a user joins one.

The scoring comes from Binance's points FAQ. A few dollars of buying earns the first point, and a user then gets one more point each time the day's buying doubles. Fall a dollar short of the next doubling and the day earns one point less.

One condition applies. Since October 22, 2025, buying points count only once a user's balance points, earned by holding assets, reach the equivalent of $100.

Selling does not take points away. The FAQ says so in plain words, and adds that a $600 buy still earns its points after a $500 sale. Only buys through Binance Wallet (Keyless) or the exchange count.

So a wallet that holds enough can buy a token, sell it straight back, and keep the buying points. Between August 24 and September 22, 1,707 wallets traded quq this way, over and over, for $4.76 billion of trading. That was 94% of all the quq trading we recorded. We call it points farming, buying a token and selling it back to collect Alpha points. The trades are real, yet nobody ends up holding the token, so our tests count the trading as not real.

03 · The fingerprintDays that stop at a power of two

For 98.6% of the wallets, the median day's buying came within 5% of a power of two, most often $65,536 or $32,768. If daily totals fell at random, about one in seven would land that close.

Day by day the fit is tighter. On four in five of their buying days the total came within 1% of a power of two, and on about a third within 0.1%. Days near a step sat at or just above the line almost every time, so very few fell short of the point.

The selling follows the same routine. On every buying day but one, the wallets also sold the same day, and on almost all of them they sold back the same number of tokens they had bought. The median day's buying and selling took under five minutes. On the median day about 1,600 of the wallets were at it, and three in four bought on every full day in our window.

04 · The billAbout 2 cents per $100

Each round trip, a buy and its sale, loses the pool's fee and a small price move. Across the month the farming wallets got back all but about 2 cents of every $100 they spent. For all of them together that came to under half a million dollars, and for the median wallet about $240 over the month.

That puts the average point at well under a dollar. The last one costs more, since going from 15 points to 16 doubles the day's buying and adds about $6.55 of cost. What a point is finally worth depends on the airdrops and launches it gets a wallet into, and we did not price those.

05 · The appOne contract our labels tie to Binance Wallet

Nearly all of these wallets' quq trades, 99.9% of those we read, went through one contract. Our labels tie it to Binance Wallet on BNB Chain and Ethereum, and to Binance Wallet's DEX router on four more chains. Alpha points count only for buys through Binance Wallet or the exchange, so this fits. Almost all of the trading ran through one PancakeSwap pool, quq against USDT.

The contract tells us which app placed the trades. It does not tell us who owns the wallets, or whether one person runs many of them.

06 · The rulesWhat Binance's terms say

The current Binance Wallet Terms bar market manipulation in using Binance Alpha. Their examples include wash trading and self dealing, and the ban covers manipulation "for the purposes of accumulating Binance Alpha Points to which you are not properly entitled". That version is dated September 23, 2026, the day after our window closed, and we could not retrieve the one in force during it.

The points FAQ, last updated in July, describes a buy that keeps its points after a sale. It also says splitting balances across accounts to earn more points is not allowed. We make no finding on whether any of these wallets broke Binance's terms.

07 · How bigHalf of BNB Chain's not-real trading

quq is the biggest Alpha token in our count, and it has company. Tokens on Binance Alpha's list hold half of all the trading our tests flag on BNB Chain. Leave quq out and the flagged share inside Alpha tokens comes close to the chain's own.

These totals leave out $39.1 billion of BNB Chain trading that we set aside because it ran at prices no one else paid or looped through pools far too small for it. Most of that is the $33.8 billion wallet in our BNB Chain story.

The next two Alpha tokens by flagged trading, DEBIT and KII, look different. Most of their wallets do not stop at points steps. For about a quarter of DEBIT's wallets the median day's buying came near a power of two, more than chance would give, so some of them may be collecting points too. For KII it was a sixth, about what chance gives. Almost all of KII's flagged trading came from a batch of wallets that all started on the same day in early September.

We do not know who runs DEBIT's and KII's wallets, or why most of them traded. We have no evidence linking these wallets to Teller or KiiChain, the names Binance's list gives the two tokens, or to the team behind quq.

08 · What we cannot sayThe limits

• What the points were worth. Airdrops and launches vary, and we did not price them.
• Who runs the wallets. Our data shows addresses only.
• The full points total. Binance adds up all Alpha buys in a day and also scores balances held, which decide whether buying points count at all. We measured quq buys alone and could not see balances or Binance's points records.
• Everyone who does it. We counted the wallets our tests flag. Others may farm points in ways our tests do not catch.
• Anything about Binance's knowledge or intent. We describe trades on the chain, nothing more.

09 · QuestionsWhat readers ask

What are Alpha points worth? Nobody can say in general. Points decide who can join launches and claim airdrops, and those vary in value from one to the next.

Is this allowed? Binance's current terms bar market manipulation in Binance Alpha, such as wash trading, including to collect points a user is not entitled to. Its FAQ says a sale does not remove the points from a buy. We make no finding either way.

Is it one person or many? We cannot tell from the chain. The wallets share a routine and an app, and that is all our data shows.

Does Binance show this volume? Yes. The day after our window, Binance's Alpha list showed quq with about $146 million of trading in the past 24 hours, against a market cap of about $1.6 million.

Why is it so cheap? The wallets sell back seconds after they buy, so the price has almost no time to move. What they lose is mostly the pool's fee.

Is it common? Alpha tokens hold half the trading our tests flag on BNB Chain. quq is the one where the points pattern is plain.

10 · How to spot itThree signs of points farming

Each of these can be checked from public data.

• Round numbers in binary. A wallet whose buys add up to a power of two, such as $65,536, day after day.
• Sold straight back. Each buy matched by a sale of the same size, seconds later.
• Volume far above market cap. A small token trading many times its own value in a day, as quq did on the Alpha list. A token's trade history shows all three.

11 · How we measuredWhere the numbers come from

We added up every wallet's quq buys and sales for each UTC day, the same day Binance uses, from the afternoon of August 24 to September 22. A handful of small wallets, with under $100,000 of trading between them, are missing from the daily figures.

A wallet counts when our tests flag its trading as not real. That means it bought and sold the same token at bot speed and got back about what it paid. A random day's total would land that close to a points step about one time in seven. When we tried made-up steps halfway between the real ones, almost none of the wallets matched them.

The cost of a round trip is what a wallet paid for the tokens it sold back, minus what it got for them, before gas. Market cap comes from our hourly quq price. Points follow Binance's published rule. The Alpha token list and its figures are Binance's own, taken the day after our window closed.

12 · The recordThe addresses behind the story