Gate.io Delisting Causes Nearly 30 Tokens to Crash

Gate.io delisted 33 separate tokens and their USDT trading pairs today, causing the vast majority of them to crash. The exchange cited quality issues, and most of these tokens have tiny valuations.

Coinbase also delisted four tokens, claiming that each relevant company was rebranding the assets in question. This caused different results; for example, it delisted RNDR, causing RENDER from the same company to grow slightly.

Gate.io Delists 33 Tokens

Gate.io, a popular centralized exchange, has been making some bold moves since its 12-year anniversary last month.

Between major interface overhauls and new business licenses, the exchange has remained in the spotlight. Today, Gate.io announced that it would delist 33 tokens at once, throwing the market into chaos:

“Gate has conducted a thorough reuation of 33 coins and determined that they no longer meet our platform’s trading criteria. As a result, we will delist these coins from our platform. After delisting. we will continue to provide a 1-month withdrawal service for users,” the firm claimed.

The full list of casualties from Gate.io’s mass delisting is quite large, almost entirely consisting of small projects. The firm lists a wide array of cryptoassets, including GameFi initiatives, restaking projects, AI tokens, and more.

Most of these assets completely crashed afterward, with Unlighted (ULD) falling more than 40%.

ULD Crash After Gate.io Delisting. Source: CoinGecko

ULD was a particularly big loser, but a few others stand out. After Gate.io delisted them, RATIO fell by 27%, OpenDAO (SOS) by 33%, Kine Protocol (KINE) by 21%, etc. Not every asset crashed like this, but even the outliers tell revealing stories.

For example, Finblox (FBX) only dropped 2%, but it already crashed earlier this month, losing nearly 40% in the last two weeks.

Mass delistings like Gate.io’s can cause a generalized rout, especially for these smaller tokens.

Last month, Binance also caused a free fall by delisting 14 assets at once, most of which posted double-digit losses.

Today, the community seemed unbothered by this event, with users either mocking the projects or praising the company’s actions.

Apparently, the consensus holds that Gate.io had valid reasons to delist these assets, considering them low-quality or otherwise irrelevant to the broader ecosystem. It offered to buy them back from users, showing uniformly tiny prices.

Buyback for Delisted Tokens. Source: Gate.io

Meanwhile, Coinbase also announced a mass delisting shortly after Gate.io. However, Coinbase didn’t do this to reject these assets on quality grounds.

It named four companies, each of which is replacing its extant token with a new asset. These replacements and rebrands have been doing well; RENDER actually grew after RNDR’s delisting.

Coinbase’s delisting helps explain Gate.io’s own motivations. The former exchange wanted to cull assets from a cluttered list of options, but it apparently plans to replace them all.

Gate.io, on the other hand, seems to be separating the wheat from the chaff. For these unlucky tokens, this delisting could cause permanent damage.