Author: TechFlow
"Red and black, it is the interweaving of ambition and reality, the collision of hope and cruelty." -- The Red and the Black
In the crypto market, the rise and fall of prices is an endless game of wits; the success or failure of a project is more like a series of battles between trust and doubt.
As depicted in the classic novel The Red and the Black, red symbolizes passion and hope, while black represents shadows and crises.
When we turn our attention to the recent project RedStone that launched on the Binance Launchpool, this "red and black" contrast is particularly striking:
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).
Within the past week, this "red stone" has become a highlight in the sluggish market, with its Token RED performing well in the pre-market on Binance.
However, as the hype has heated up, issues such as the recent airdrop controversy and price volatility in the pre-market have gradually emerged, causing this "red stone" to gradually "blacken" in the eyes of some community members.
A battle of red and black, a test of community trust and market rules.
The Red Stone in the Price 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 the pre-trading of Launchpool, aiming to control volatility by limiting the price increase, and avoid the familiar "Christmas tree" style of violent fluctuations in the early stage of token issuance.
Since the launch of RED in the pre-market, this mechanism has quickly ignited market enthusiasm.
In the three consecutive trading days, the price of RED repeatedly hit the price limit, and after the price limit was lifted, it even soared to $1.4, becoming the focus of the pre-market.
As of now, RED is currently priced at $0.83, with a market capitalization of $33 million and a fully diluted market capitalization of $830 million. For a project that just launched in a bearish market, the initial performance is indeed impressive, giving people a sense that "the price limit can't contain the upward trend".
When there's money to be made, people naturally like it.
The price limit mechanism has indeed brought market heat to RED, but the applicability of this "red" behind it still needs to be tested.
The continuous price increase has attracted a lot of attention, but it may also cover up potential issues that may ferment in the community.
The Black Spot in the Airdrop Controversy
The entanglement of interests, or the airdrop.
In the previous gameplay, RedStone launched three "exploration activities" through the Zealy and Discord platforms, requiring community members to complete different tasks, such as reading technical documents, writing analysis articles, creating image materials, and even continuously outputting content during the Spring Festival holiday.
These tasks were promoted as opportunities to "co-build the ecosystem", and community members could earn RSG points by completing the tasks, which RedStone promised would be the key credentials for the future RED token airdrop.
To put it more bluntly, this wool-picking was a bit liver-damaging.
According to its token economics (RED Token Economics), RedStone plans to allocate 48.3% of the tokens to the ecosystem and community, with 10% for the initial community claim, which the community players had high hopes for.
However, on March 5, 2025, when RedStone announced the airdrop results, the community's enthusiasm quickly cooled down.
The official announced that only 2.19% of the community members (a total of 4,386 people) received the RED token reward, and the remaining large number of players' RSG points were deemed invalid, leaving the hard-working players with nothing in the end.
Not being few, but being uneven, the liver-damaging tasks may have yielded nothing, but having an identity may have resulted in an airdrop.
According to RedStone's official post, the Discord identity became the key to receiving the airdrop. Eligible roles include Vein Master, Deep Miner, Professor, and IRL (participated in offline activities). Public data shows that the proportion of people with the above roles in the project's DC group is only 2%.
Therefore, based on the total community size of around 230,000, the number of people who can receive this airdrop is just over 4,000, as mentioned earlier.
As soon as the airdrop results were released, the dissatisfaction of community members began to spread across various social media.
Some netizens joked that if you didn't get the RED airdrop, don't worry, because you'll never walk alone.
And angrier players have started to file complaints, with some scathing posts quickly circulating in Chinese and English communities, even using hostile language, directly accusing RedStone of exploiting the community users.
As a neutral observer, I cannot verify whether the allegations in these posts are all true; but the resentment of the community cannot be ignored, as the story of water being able to carry a boat, and also being able to overturn it, is frequently played out in the crypto world.
But at its core, the community's anger is simply "I worked hard but didn't qualify".
Many users, even if they have accumulated millions of points, are still excluded and seen as "invalid labor": the reward ratio of only 2.19% highlights the long-standing problem of "airdrop PUA" - the project guides users to labor through high-intensity tasks before the token launch, but does not fully deliver on the promised rewards.
When the community members' efforts are gradually devalued as the "sacrificial victims" of "digital contract workers", the players in the midst of it naturally feel that they have been PUA'd and worked for free to promote the project, and the fruits of the revolution have been stolen by those with more identity.
Price Volatility in the Pre-Market
Given the community members' dissatisfaction with the airdrop, if the token price also shows abnormalities, it will naturally further deepen everyone's misunderstanding and distrust.
This afternoon, some community members shared screenshots showing that the price curve of RED in the pre-market was presenting an extremely erratic fluctuation, completely unlike a normal price trend.
Subsequently, the well-known KOL @_FORAB also discovered similar issues and speculated that there seemed to be problems with the RED market maker, with a large number of orders being withdrawn, resulting in a high price difference and large wave-like trend.
This situation also easily leads people to misunderstand that the market maker is playing a solo act, repeatedly pulling the price up and down without a proportionate retail counterparty.
However, Stephen, the community manager of RedStone's Chinese community, later clarified in the comments that the problem was not caused by the market maker. RED in the pre-market did not have market maker participation, and the price fluctuations were actually due to the trading rule design that limits each person to only 5,000 RED transactions.
Subsequently, Binance officially responded that the RED/USDT limit order function experienced a malfunction from 11:39 to 12:09 on March 6, 2025, but the market order function was normal, and the platform has now completed the repair.
In the end, although the issue was not caused by market maker manipulation, the violent price fluctuations have also quickly spread the "manipulation theory" in the community, given the already unstable emotions in the RedStone community.
Although RedStone and Binance have clarified the actual reasons for the problem, in the crypto market, retail investors are often more inclined to believe in conspiracy theories rather than technical explanations. This public opinion effect has further exacerbated the community's distrust.
Summary
Profit-driven, the relationship between projects and communities in the crypto industry is always a delicate one: they need each other, but sometimes they also feel they are hurting each other.
From its innovative multi-chain architecture to Binance's limit-up mechanism, and then to the airdrop controversy and price fluctuations, this project has experienced a high degree of market attention and a severe test of community trust in a short period of time. The airdrop results of RedStone have left the vast majority of participants disappointed, and even raised doubts 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 challenge for the future is how to repair community relations and establish more transparent and robust mechanisms at the technical and operational levels. Perhaps, from a broader perspective, what the crypto projects in this round need is not only technological innovation, but also a deep understanding of community emotions and a comprehensive optimization of market rules. Gain the community, gain the world.
