As a reminder, so-called vosh trading is the conduct of a huge amount of trading for the sake of creating imaginary volumes on a particular platform or in a pair with a particular cryptocurrency. While there is no commission, there is no financial cost for vosh trading, but for the increased volumes on Binance, you can get new VIP account levels, which gives a discount on commissions in other cryptocurrencies trading.

The day before, Binance temporarily cancelled commissions on transactions in certain trading pairs in honor of the exchange’s fifth birthday. However, commission-free trading in general is not a new topic. In particular, the Woo X exchange allows for no commission on spot and futures trades, provided that the WOO is stacked at 1800 WOO, i.e. the platform’s native token. In addition, in this case, the user receives one free cryptocurrency withdrawal per day. In general, commissions can also be negative, accruing to the trader’s account, but this requires more advanced levels of staking.

Woo X cryptocurrency exchange interface

Be that as it may, Binance’s initiative has caused unexpected problems due to users’ desire to elevate their status due to increased trading volumes.

The innovation of cryptocurrency exchanges

Here’s Changpen Zhao’s quote from Twitter, in which he responded to a tweet from the Mandala Exchange platform’s community manager. The latter initially noticed how the huge volumes on Binance barely changed the price of Bitcoin, which led to suspicions of vosh trading.

I think it’s all about zero commissions, people trying to earn new levels of VIP status. We will remove BTC trading volumes from the calculations for VIP statuses.

If rates were actively changing with increasing volumes there would be no questions to what is happening, because usually it is activation of traders that is able to change asset's value. However here the market remained stable, so the situation attracted attention of analysts.

According to Decrypt’s sources, within hours Binance released an announcement excluding thirteen different Bitcoin trading pairs from the list of ways to raise VIP status. The changes were made to “ensure a fair trading environment for all users”. That is, in essence, traders have been deprived of the opportunity to raise their own status through free trading, which is fair enough.

New conditions for VIP-trades on Binance

Judging by the fact of cancellation of commissions, even during the bearish trend at Binance, things are going quite well, which cannot be said about the platform Voyager Digital. On the eve of the company Alameda Research, headed by the head of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, expanded the line of credit for Voyager up to $ 500 million. However, it has now emerged that US financial regulators have filed a lawsuit against the platform over the freezing of customer withdrawals.

In fact, so far, not even Bankman-Fried’s help is saving Voyager from collapse on all fronts. The plaintiffs claim that the platform’s management was not too transparent initially in terms of disclosing its own solvency. Unfortunately, the legal proceedings in this case will only further diminish Voyager’s prospects of recovery.

Lazio players in uniform with the Binance logo

Note that the inconvenience for Binance does not end there. In particular, Reuters journalists today published an article stating that the cryptocurrency exchange’s KYC system was too weak. Because of this, the platform was allegedly providing access to trading to Iranian nationals, although this is prohibited due to US sanctions.

Changpen Zhao was quick to respond to the event and said that Binance has been using the so-called Reuters WorldCheck as a user identity verification tool since 2018. Accordingly, such news from journalists, among others, negatively affects the reputation of their products.

Overall, this is not Reuters’ first attack on this cryptocurrency exchange. Back in June 2022, they claimed Binance was allegedly being used to launder billions of dollars. Representatives of the exchange responded convincingly at the time.


We think the situation has turned out to be quite amusing. Since the representatives of Binance did not initially turn off the possibility to use free commissions to raise their own level of trader, it means that they probably did not foresee such a scenario. However, more resourceful cryptocurrency traders will not be able to take advantage of the scheme.