Binance Delisting: Why were SALT lending, Substratum and others delisted from Binance?

Binance, one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges announced on Friday that they will be delisting five altcoins, CLOAK, MOD, SALT, SUB and WINGS.

Binance’s reasons for such delisting were articulated in their blog and included, commitment of the team to project, level and quality of development activity, evidence of unethical/fraudulent conduct, among other reasons.

This isn’t a surprising development however as some of the delisted tokens do have a very dodgy history. Below is a small collection of facts that could have contributed to Binance’s decision to delist the select tokens.

SALT

The SALT token has quite a history since it once came under the SEC’s radar in February 2018 when it was subpoenaed for allegedly distributing securities tokens to insiders and seeking information on the $50 million it raised during its ICO.

Moreover, as per the data obtained from CoinMarketCap, it can be seen that the price of SALT fell from approximately $18 to a low of $1 and the company were forced to remove the option of paying principal to the loans using SALT tokens. This was a major concern since SALT tokens were fixed at a constant retail price, marked much higher than the market value of the tokens.

The price of SALT has suffered a huge blow due to the delisting announcement by Binance.  The token which was trading at $0.21 has collapsed massively in a single hourly candle to the bottom and was trading as low at a low of $0.17, which is a decrease of 19%.

Considering that Binance is the major contributor to trading volume for SALT [~70% via trade pairs SALT/USDT, SALT/BTC], the actual delisting might cause another huge blow to the trading volume as well as the price.

SUBSTRATUM

Substratum has also received a lot of negative publicity ever since the ICO ended. Brian Li had reported that there were discrepancies in the ICO funds collected, soon after it ended. His report also suggested that tokens including 2.5 BTC, 702 BCH, 1142 ETH, and 35 LTC were missing from the ICO funds. This report was made worse after he mentioned that the CEO of Substratum was able to afford a ‘$400,000 home and a bunch of new toys in the first week of October 2017″.

Moreover, the fact that Substratum’s Founder,  Justin Tabb, admitted to using the funds raised through ICO in his trades, for a company that is trying to decentralize the internet raises a huge red flag.

The price for SUB followed the same course as SALT, as it fell from $0.044 to $0.026, which is a decrease of 40.9% within a span of a couple of hours of the announcement.