Original author: TechFlow
Red and Black are the interweaving of ambition and reality, and the collision of enthusiasm and coldness. --Red and Black
In the crypto market, the rise and fall of prices is a never-ending game; and the success or failure of a project is more like a contest between trust and suspicion.
As depicted in the famous novel The Red and the Black, red symbolizes passion and hope, while black represents shadow and crisis.
This “red and black” contrast is particularly striking when we turn our attention to the RedStone project that was recently launched on Binance Launchpool:
As a representative of the new cross-chain oracle, RedStone has previously attracted market attention with its innovative multi-chain architecture and strong investment background (including Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain Capital, etc.).
In the past week, this red stone has become a bright spot in the dull market, and the price of its token RED in the Binance pre-market market has once soared.
However, as the popularity of the cryptocurrency grew, issues such as the airdrop controversy and pre-market price fluctuations that have been hotly discussed on social media have gradually been exposed, causing this red stone to gradually become blackened in the eyes of some community members.
A battle between red and black, a test of community trust and market rules.
Redstone in the daily limit test
In the crypto market, innovation is often the key to attracting attention.
The “Price Cap Mechanism” launched by Binance for RedStone (RED) has undoubtedly become the biggest highlight of this experiment.
On February 25, 2025, Binance announced that it would test this mechanism in pre-market trading on Launchpool, aiming to control volatility by limiting price increases and avoiding the Christmas tree-style violent fluctuations that have become commonplace in the early stages of token issuance.
Since RED was launched in the pre-market, this mechanism has quickly ignited market enthusiasm.
During the three consecutive days of trading, the price of RED repeatedly hit the upper limit of the daily price limit. After the price limit was lifted, it soared to US$1.4, becoming the focus of the pre-market.
As of now, RED is trading at $0.83, with a market value of $33 million and a fully circulated market value of $830 million. For a project that was just launched in a bear market, the initial performance is indeed impressive, and it also gives everyone a feeling that even the daily limit cannot stop the rise.
If you can make money, everyone will naturally like it.
The daily limit mechanism has indeed brought market popularity to RED, but its applicability remains to be tested.
While the continued rise in prices has attracted a lot of attention, it may also mask underlying issues that may be brewing in the community.
Black Spot in the Airdrop Controversy
The entanglement of interests is still the airdrop.
In the previous gameplay, RedStone launched three adventure activities through the Zealy and Discord platforms, requiring community members to complete different tasks, such as studying technical documents, writing analysis articles, producing image materials, and even continuously outputting content during the Spring Festival holiday.
These tasks are promoted as opportunities to “build an ecosystem together,” and community members earn RSG points by completing tasks. RedStone promises that these points will be key credentials for future RED token airdrops.
To put it more bluntly, this is a bit of a waste of money.
According to its token economics ( RED token economics ), RedStone plans to allocate 48.3% of tokens to the ecosystem and community, of which 10% will be used for initial community adoption, and is highly anticipated by community players.
However, on March 5, 2025, when RedStone announced the results of the airdrop, the community’s enthusiasm quickly cooled.
The official announcement stated that only 2.19% of the community members (4,386 people in total) received RED token rewards, and the RSG points of the remaining large number of players were judged invalid. It seemed that the hard-working players had nothing in the end.
What is worrying is not the lack of rewards but the inequality of rewards. You may get nothing by completing tasks, but you may get airdrops if you have status.
According to RedStones official post, the identity in Discord has become the key to obtaining airdrops. Eligible roles include Vein Master, Deep Miner, Professor, IRL (participated in offline activities), etc. However, public data shows that the proportion of people with the above roles in the project DC group is only 2%.
Therefore, based on the total community population of about 230,000, the number of people who can receive this airdrop is the 4,000+ mentioned above.
As soon as the airdrop results came out, dissatisfaction among community members began to spread on various social media.
Some netizens joked that if you didn’t get the RED airdrop, please don’t worry, because you will never walk alone.
The angrier players started to make complaints directly. For example, some negative posts were quickly forwarded in Chinese and English communities. The writing style was sharp and even the words were somewhat hostile, pointing out that RedStone was exploiting community users.
As a neutral observer, I have no way of verifying whether every word of the accusations in these posts is true; but the resentment in the community cannot be ignored. After all, the story of water being able to carry a boat but also being able to capsize it is frequently played out in the crypto world.
But at its core, the community’s anger, to put it bluntly, is still “I work hard but I’m not qualified.”
Even if many users have accumulated millions of points, they are still excluded and regarded as invalid labor: the reward ratio of only 2.19% highlights the problem of the old-fashioned airdrop PUA - that is, the project guides users to work through high-intensity tasks before the token is launched, but fails to fully fulfill its promises as expected.
When the efforts of community members are gradually devalued as victims of “digital indentured labor,” players in the game will naturally feel that they are being PUA’d into working and promoting the project for free, and in the end the fruits of the revolution are stolen by people with more status.
Pre-market price changes
Given that the above-mentioned airdrop has displeased community members, if there are further abnormalities in the token price, it will obviously deepen everyone’s misunderstanding and distrust.
This afternoon, some community members posted screenshots showing that the price curve of RED in the pre-market showed an extremely outrageous oscillation, which was completely unlike the normal price trend.
Later, the well-known KOL @_FORAB also discovered a similar problem and speculated that there seemed to be a problem with REDs market maker, and a large number of pending orders were withdrawn, resulting in a large wave trend with a high price difference.
This situation can easily lead people to mistakenly believe that market makers are playing a one-man show, pushing prices back and forth without a proportional number of retail counterparties.
However, Stephen, the Chinese community manager of RedStone, later clarified in the comments that the problem was not caused by market makers. RED did not set up market makers in the pre-market, and the price change was actually caused by the trading rule design that each person could only trade 5,000 RED.
Subsequently, Binance officially responded that the RED/USDT limit order function malfunctioned between 11:39 and 12:09 on March 6, 2025, but the market order function worked normally and the platform has now completed the repair.
Judging from the results, although the incident did not originate from market maker manipulation, the sharp price fluctuations in the current RedStone community, given the already unstable sentiment, also caused the manipulation theory to spread rapidly in the community.
Although both RedStone and Binance have clarified the actual cause of the problem, in the crypto market, retail investors tend to believe conspiracy theories rather than technical explanations. This public opinion effect has further exacerbated the communitys distrust.
Summarize
With profit at the forefront, there is always a delicate relationship between project owners and communities in the crypto industry: they need each other, but sometimes they also feel that they are hurting each other.
From its innovative multi-chain architecture to Binance’s daily price limit mechanism, to airdrop controversies and price fluctuations, this project has experienced a high level of market attention in a short period of time, and has also suffered a severe test of community trust.
The results of RedStone’s airdrop disappointed most participants and even triggered questions about “PUA”-style exploitation. This sentiment is highly contagious in the crypto market, especially in an environment where the community is highly sensitive to fairness.
For RedStone, the future challenge lies in how to repair community relations and establish more transparent and robust mechanisms at the technical and operational levels.
Perhaps, looking at this round of crypto projects from a broader perspective, what is needed is not only technological innovation, but also a deep insight into community sentiment and comprehensive optimization of market rules.
Whoever wins the community wins the world.
