Male College Student Shares His Experience: Binance Alpha on Campus
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Male College Student Shares His Experience: Binance Alpha on Campus
Won't affect my civil service exam, right?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsThis is a story about a small-time crypto enthusiast with dreams of striking it rich, returning to campus to "promote" Binance Alpha. What seemed like a simple way to make money turned out to be hilariously complicated in practice—due to ordinary people's prejudice against crypto, regulatory crackdowns, and various unexpected twists...
A monk spreads the Dharma; I spread Binance Alpha
I'm Xiao Jin, a recent college graduate, and right now I feel ashamed.
While interning at a Web3 company in another city, living the good life, I didn’t think of my roommates. But when I recently realized that Binance Alpha was extremely profitable and decided to scale up operations, their adorable faces instantly popped into my mind.
Image from the internet
Shameful as it is, “anyone who refuses easy money is an idiot”—just share the profits with them! Monks preach Buddhism for enlightenment; I promote Binance Alpha for profit.
So while returning to school for my graduation thesis defense, I seized the opportunity to pull all my roommates onto this “pirate ship”! There are six of us in the dorm. I’d already brought “Xiao Guo” on board during Binance Wallet’s exclusive TGE (initial offering) event to help me out, so four more remained to be converted.
Before going back, I first tried pushing them online—get them to register Binance accounts! As a proper hands-off boss, I naturally delegated this task to Xiao Guo, who was already on campus.
A day later:
“Xiao Guo, how many Binance accounts did you get from the dorm?” “Well, only one—Lao Gao agreed. The others were hesitant once they saw ID verification was required. But Lao Gao said his girlfriend can also sign up—that makes two.”
Alright, putting myself in their shoes, if someone randomly asked me to register on a platform requiring ID, I wouldn't agree either. I might even suspect it was some pyramid scheme or shady loan app. Looks like I’ll have to return to the dorm and personally appeal to their emotions and reason!
Get paid just for registering? Could this affect my civil service exam?
Scene shift—I’m back in the dorm, sitting by my roommate’s bed.
Image from the internet, not the author
“Xiao Yu, have you heard of Bitcoin?”
“Huh? Bitcoin? Heard of it, yeah—didn’t those who bought early become overnight millionaires? Wait, did you buy any?” Xiao Yu mumbled without looking up from his phone, fully focused on Honor of Kings.
I replied tearfully, “Of course not!” Then slowly explained: “There are cryptocurrency exchanges trying to attract new users—they offer very valuable rewards. You just need to register an account; I’ll handle the rest.”
“Is this that thing Xiao Guo mentioned? Xiao Ye said it requires ID, so he didn’t do it—and neither did I.”
“I’ll give you a cut—earn enough in a month to buy several legendary skins!”
Hearing “legendary skins,” Xiao Yu finally perked up, but still hesitated: “Really? Is it legit? Will doing this affect my civil service exam prep?”
“Totally legitimate! Would I trick you? You can even search ‘Binance Alpha’ on Xiaohongshu. Plus, these exchanges are overseas—their data doesn’t connect with China’s. No relation whatsoever!”
“Well… okay.” After much hesitation, the desire for skins outweighed caution. Xiao Yu agreed. Binance account +1. Even someone who usually trusts me deeply showed such wariness—this shows that to most ordinary college students, ‘cryptocurrency’ and ‘overseas exchanges’ remain terrifying concepts, burdened with deep prejudice. At the same time, I couldn’t help but marvel at the effectiveness of Binance Alpha’s cash-driven user acquisition: No matter how strong the bias, wealth effects will eventually break through.
The key, clearly, was profit-sharing. So I repeated the tactic, successfully luring Xiao Ye with promised returns. Another account secured.
You Huawei phone may protest, but it calls Binance a virus
Now only Xiao Zhao remained. He wasn’t short on money and didn’t care much about profit-sharing, but due to peer pressure, he reluctantly agreed to help register. Ten minutes later…
“Xiao Jinjin, my Huawei phone says your app is a virus! I don’t feel safe. Forget it—I’m out!”
Huawei phone flags Binance as a virus during installation
I was stunned. Despite being a college student, I’ve been in the crypto space for years and had long forgotten how heavily the external environment restricts ordinary people from accessing crypto platforms. Turns out, scaling up accounts isn’t as easy as it sounds! (Later I learned that HarmonyOS makes installing exchange apps even harder.)
After much effort, I still couldn’t convince Xiao Zhao. But counting both roommates and their friends, I now had nearly 10 accounts. Time to rake in the profits, right? Well, the plot took another unexpected turn.
Plot twist: My roommate is actually a trading genius!
These are regular college students who’ve mostly only used Alipay to buy funds—many haven’t even opened stock accounts. They know absolutely nothing about trading. After painstakingly teaching them how to complete daily trading tasks, things went wrong again at withdrawal time.
A new round of Alpha airdrop qualified, though not particularly valuable. Xiao Ye received LA tokens but didn’t know how to sell them—he’d only ever done volume farming for ZKJ before. Panicking, he accidentally hit ‘buy’ instead.
Looking at the screenshot Xiao Guo sent, calculating potential losses, I nearly lost it.
But then I noticed—the attempted sell order above had failed. Instantly recalling the sharp post-listing price drops seen across multiple Alpha token K-charts, cold sweat broke out. If we hadn’t sold in time, we could’ve lost hundreds of dollars. Truly: I wanted their airdrop, but they wanted my principal!
Luckily, plot twist again!
Xiao Ye’s accidental buy happened to land exactly at LA’s lowest price point. After a series of moves, his 50u airdrop grew into 300u. A true case of “blessing in disguise.” Amidst my own string of crypto losses, I felt like I was witnessing the rise of a genuine trading prodigy.
Still, my panic over his mistake served as a reminder: Crypto is extremely risky—ordinary users can suffer major losses with just one slip-up.
Profits falling—am I about to go bankrupt before I even got started?
This rocky start made me more cautious, but problems kept piling up. Luckily, during the ZKJ crash days, we avoided heavy trading volume. We dodged one bullet, only to face another: “no coins to trade, wear-and-tear too high.”
Xiao Guo uses AB to farm trading volume, caught in capital manipulation
When prices were stable, the cost of farming Alpha token volume was bearable. But once unlucky—caught in sharp price swings during farming—it meant instant losses starting at 10u, 20u or more.
As daily transaction score maintenance costs rose, combined with increasingly competitive Binance Alpha scoring requirements and declining airdrop values (sometimes under 50u), my Alpha entrepreneurial journey seemed destined to end before it truly began.
Especially after introducing the “first-come, first-served” mechanism: pay fees to farm volume, yet fail to secure any tokens at all. Not only no profit—you risk losing everything.
Earning money as a college student is tough. Even a supposedly “easy mode” path like Binance Alpha becomes full of setbacks when executed at scale. Yet, before the mess clears, ordinary people briefly experience wealth effects, while Binance gains massive numbers of new users. In this game, who loses, and who wins?
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