From "Ranking" to "Discovering Hundredfold Coins": How MEXC Tomorrow's Star Restructures the Discovery Path of On-Chain Assets?

In the rapidly changing cryptocurrency market, who wouldn't want to seize the next "potential coin" with a hundredfold growth in advance? The DEX+ "Rising Star" event launched by MEXC is quietly changing the way on-chain assets are discovered early. The traditional voting mechanism for listing coins (vote to list) is more marketing-oriented, allowing project teams to attract and manipulate results through airdrops, vote buying, and other means, making it difficult to reflect true market potential. In contrast, "Rising Star" uses an innovative "trade to list" logic, driven by real trading volume at its core, to filter projects.

Users can quickly filter high-potential tokens through trading volume, assessing early opportunities through trading performance, leaderboard trends, and other dimensions before the project enters the main site, thus reducing information costs; project teams can leverage traffic within the CEX ecosystem to achieve a cold start and obtain "listing votes"; exchanges can empower truly popular projects, moving away from the role of a "cash machine."

This article will delve into how MEXC's "Rising Star" creates a "win-win" situation for investors and project teams, achieving a positive cycle of "trading as investment, trading as cold start."

1. Information Overload and Complex Filtering: How Does "Rising Star" Become an Early Discovery Window?

Currently, the surge in the number of tokens combined with insufficient liquidity greatly increases the difficulty for ordinary retail investors to participate. According to Dune data, the number of crypto tokens skyrocketed from 3.4 million at the end of 2021 to 44 million by May 2025, growing more than 12 times, with 7.67 million new tokens added just in the first four months of this year. On the other hand, DeFiLlama shows that DeFi TVL has dropped from $168.5 billion at the end of 2022 to $113.7 billion now, a decrease of 48%. On one hand, insufficient liquidity weakens the momentum for price increases of individual tokens; on the other hand, finding high-potential tokens among millions of tokens is like searching for a needle in a haystack, requiring a significant amount of time and effort for analysis, resulting in high filtering costs.

Data source: https://dune.com/queries/4303251/7229047

Through "Rising Star," users can discover projects with high market attention, active communities, and strong liquidity, obtaining tickets for early high-potential projects. Trading volume is directly counted in the project points leaderboard, equivalent to "real money" voting, fairly reflecting real market demand. If the points of the supported project increase, it may be listed on MEXC's main board, bringing value growth (depending on the market).

Additionally, MEXC's "Rising Star" has set up a prize pool of up to thousands of USDT, allowing users to share rewards based on their trading volume contributions. This allows users to gain extra returns while supporting potential projects, achieving "two benefits from one action."

2. Multiple Drivers of Traffic and Endorsement: "Rising Star" Restructures the Lightweight Listing Path

For project teams, the difficulty of cold starts is also increasing. In a context of dispersed liquidity and limited user attention, new projects often fall into a cycle of "no attention—insufficient trading—poor data—further marginalization."

"Rising Star" attempts to provide a more structured solution to this problem. Relying on MEXC's vast user base and community influence, it acts as a "traffic amplifier" for early on-chain projects: users' trading behaviors directly affect the project's ranking on the leaderboard, allowing it to gain exposure opportunities right from the cold start phase. At the same time, MEXC's endorsement as a well-known exchange also brings additional trust premiums to the projects.

Moreover, the traditional listing process for CEX is often lengthy and has high barriers. The "Rising Star" mechanism significantly simplifies the listing process, allowing project teams to gain listing qualifications by incentivizing community trading without going through cumbersome application procedures or paying high fees, quickly accumulating points to access quality liquidity from CEX. This listing path is efficient, transparent, and low-cost, not only reducing the operational burden on project teams but also providing early projects with a fair competitive opportunity.

3. Detailed Explanation of MEXC's "Rising Star" Trading Listing: How Trading Behavior Translates into Value Voting

"Rising Star" Trading Listing Selection Mechanism

MEXC's "Rising Star" selects listing projects based on the following three major criteria:

1. Top Three on the Points Leaderboard

Points are calculated based on trading volume. New users contribute 30 points for every 100 USDT in trading volume, while non-new users contribute 4 points, with a single user cap of 1,000 points. This encourages new user participation and limits the excessive influence of a single user, reflecting true market signals.

2. Daily Average Trading Volume of No Less Than $150,000

Projects must achieve an average daily trading volume of 150,000 USDT, reflecting their community activity and market demand, which is more authentic and intuitive than traditional vote-to-list mechanisms.

3. Market Capitalization of No Less Than $300,000

The market capitalization threshold is set at 300,000 USDT, which is 4-30 times higher than the graduation projects from Launchpad (e.g., Pump.fun at 69,000, LetsBonk at 15,000, Believe at 10,000), providing another round of deflation for graduated tokens while leaving room for potential "golden dogs" to hit a million in market cap.

Additionally, to prevent volume manipulation, MEXC has established strict rules prohibiting market makers and project teams from participating in points accumulation, canceling points from multiple accounts or abnormal trading, ensuring fairness and reflecting genuine user support.

Image source: MEXC DEX+ "Rising Star"

Advantages of "Rising Star" Trading Listing

Compared to traditional vote-to-list mechanisms (holding platform tokens to vote), MEXC's "Rising Star" trading listing mechanism centers on trading volume as the core standard, setting minimum daily average trading volume and market capitalization thresholds, significantly enhancing fairness and efficiency.

Advantages of MEXC's "Rising Star" voting listing:

1. By setting thresholds for trading volume and market capitalization, the filtered projects already possess a certain level of maturity, community activity, and trading depth, reducing liquidity risks.
2. Greater objectivity, as trading equals voting, with transparent data and anti-manipulation rules reducing vote-rigging phenomena, more authentically reflecting market potential.
3. The platform's secondary due diligence eliminates speculative projects, enhancing project reliability and ensuring listing quality.

In the current market environment of surging tokens and dispersed liquidity, MEXC's "Rising Star" trading listing mechanism establishes a two-way path based on trading for project teams and users. Has it truly brought about a wealth effect? Let's illustrate this through the following cases.

4. User Gold Mining Dual Engines: "Participation Equals Reward" and "Hitting Potential Stocks" Wealth Code

MEXC's "Rising Star" event is not only a window to observe market trends but also provides users with opportunities for dual returns: first, the rewards from the platform's activities, and second, the high returns from selecting and holding "pre-explosive assets."

Continuous Incentive Upgrades: Generous USDT Prize Pool Becomes the New Norm for "Rising Star"

After several rounds of practice, the "Rising Star" event mechanism has matured. The latest fifth season (from May 15 to May 22, 2025) has specially added a 2,000 USDT newcomer prize pool, allowing eligible new users (such as those who complete their first deposit of ≥100 USDT and complete their first DEX+ transaction during the event) to have a chance to share this additional 2,000 USDT reward. In the future, such generous USDT incentive prize pools are expected to become a regular configuration for subsequent "Rising Star" series events, continuously bringing surprises to participants. This move undoubtedly greatly lowers the participation threshold for newcomers: even with a small amount of capital, as long as they actively trade, they can receive rewards, truly achieving "everyone wins, incentives on-chain."

It is foreseeable that with the normalization of incentive mechanisms and the improvement of rules, the competitive ecology of "Rising Star" will become healthier: there will be abundant and continuous rewards attracting new users to join, along with clear standards ensuring the quality of winning projects. In such an environment, the value of the leaderboard will become increasingly significant, providing ordinary investors with an efficient window to obtain information on on-chain hot trends and a good opportunity for early value capture; for project teams, it also provides a fair competitive arena where they can rise to a larger stage by letting their strengths speak.

Historical Data Evidence: The "Star-Making" Potential of Rising Star

Image source: MEXC DEX+ Official X account

• LETSBONK: As a standout in the fourth phase of "Rising Star," it landed on the MEXC spot market on May 8 this year. After going live, its historical highest price reached 614.46% of the opening price, an astonishing return of nearly 6 times!
• ICECREAM: One of the winners of the third phase of "Rising Star," ICECREAM was approved to go live on MEXC, with its historical highest price increase reaching 177.88%.**

(The above are just two typical cases; in fact, each phase of "Rising Star" has multiple winning projects that have landed on exchanges and achieved remarkable performance. For example, FARTGIRL in the second phase and Buckazoids in the third phase. Users who got involved early in these projects mostly achieved considerable returns after they went live.)

Based on the statistics of the price increases of already listed projects, as of May 11, the average increase in closing price compared to the opening price was 34.29%, while the average increase in historical highest price compared to the opening price reached 158.86%. It can be said that "Rising Star" provides ordinary users with the opportunity to use small amounts of capital to seek returns from discovering "hundredfold coins," identifying "potential projects" with fundamentals before they gain concentrated attention from the mainstream market. In summary, filtering assets through on-chain trading rankings is essentially about finding "the one about to explode" among numerous new projects, and for participants with keen senses, its value is self-evident.

5. Building a CEX-DEX Closed Loop: Dual Drivers of Cold Start Entry and Liquidity Amplification

From a strategic perspective, "Rising Star" is an important part of MEXC's attempt to connect the CEX and DEX closed-loop systems. For a long time, traditional CEX and DEX have often fought their own battles: DEX nurtures early projects, while CEX provides mature markets and deep liquidity. MEXC's attempt effectively links the two, forming a closed loop of project incubation and trading, achieving a 1+1 > 2 effect.

Specifically, MEXC DEX+ serves as the entry point for early project incubation and cold starts, helping projects accumulate initial trading data and user feedback testing in the early stages through the "Rising Star" mechanism. At this point, MEXC then smoothly introduces them to the CEX main board market, providing larger-scale liquidity support and leverage tools. This "DEX cold start—CEX amplification" dual-phase model not only enhances the efficiency of project listings but also compresses the feedback cycle for early projects to enter the mainstream market. Over time, MEXC may create a closed-loop ecological flywheel that moves from project discovery, validation, to accelerated growth—continuously outputting high-quality early projects from DEX, while CEX provides funding and market amplification for project value, with the success of projects in turn attracting more users to focus on the next round of discovery opportunities on the MEXC platform.

6. Conclusion: Reshaping the Paradigm of On-Chain Asset Discovery

To date, starting from the initial trading incentive mechanism, "Rising Star" may have gradually evolved into a new paradigm for on-chain asset discovery. It allows a wide range of ordinary investors to participate in the discovery of early projects and enables quality new projects to no longer be trapped in the initial cold start dilemma. Through this dual drive, MEXC has truly activated the bilateral value between users and projects: users become one of the biggest beneficiaries while supporting projects, and project teams accelerate their growth with the help of users.

It is foreseeable that under the impetus of the "Rising Star" mechanism, more "hundredfold coins" will be discovered by the discerning community before they explode. More importantly, the opportunity to discover Alpha on-chain is transitioning from being exclusive to a few to becoming a high-certainty strategy that ordinary people can participate in.