Bitrue Aims to Democratize Token Listing Rights by Opening Voting Power to Users

Digital asset exchange Bitrue is seeking to engage its user community directly by distributing decision-making power for adding new token projects after the listing team thoroughly vets them.

Platform Advancing Further Voting Powers in Future Updates

Blockchain’s innate ability to decentralize products and services has long been among its key value propositions, especially when providing more democratized access to these same offerings. Governance is rapidly becoming the newest area for blockchain’s democratization efforts, and the community is joining the cause.

Bitrue, a digital assets exchange, has joined the ranks of other service providers embracing a more community-based governance approach with its decision to hand over listing votes to users, which took effect on July 27th. Bitrue’s listings team will collect project suggestions based on feedback from social media channels before analyzing the projects’ legitimacy and prospects. Projects that pass a rigorous due diligence process will be presented to the community for a vote.

Voters on these listing initiatives will stake the exchange’s native token, Bitrue Coin (BTR), to participate. Once a coin that is up for a vote reaches a certain threshold, it will be listed on the exchange and opened for trading. Users who staked coins in successful listing initiatives will be eligible for airdrops of those newly listed coins.

Eventually, Bitrue plans to open up other management and governance decision-making powers to users in areas like developing new platform features, including fresh trading pairs, and additions to the Power Piggy product — an investment tool that lets users pick and choose the coins they want to invest and generates daily interest into users’ accounts. Many of the forthcoming projects set for votes will be focused on emerging blockchain ecosystems that the platform already supports, including Cardano, Hedera Hashgraph, and Solana.

Breaking the Centralized Governance Grip

While blockchains like Polkadot and Cardano already have a community-governance angle engrained by design, these types of transparent governance mechanisms are far from the norm. The centralization of certain services has prevented true democratization and transparency from materializing as envisioned.

Exchanges are one of the leading perpetrators because of their opaque decision-making mechanisms governing platform use. In the past, these practices have caused consternation amongst the community, a case in point being Coinbase’s historical listing practices.

Any rumors that the exchange would be listing a new token lifted purchases in other venues ahead of the proposed unveiling. With the expectation that these newly listed tokens would open themselves up to material purchase momentum from Coinbase’s vast ranks of clients, it could have been viewed as a form of frontrunning given the high stakes.

Nevertheless, other platforms are moving in the same direction as Bitrue, and among them is Shapeshift. The digital assets exchange recently announced an initiative to dissolve its corporate structure and move to a community-operated framework. Its native FOX coin will serve as ownership and governance tokens in this new, entirely decentralized structure.

Given the importance of the community in blockchain projects, other platforms may quickly follow suit to democratize governance over their products and services, and by extension, deliver improved transparency and involvement that ultimately benefit all an ecosystem’s stakeholders.