Picture a round that goes entirely to plan. The announcement lands, you lock up, a fortnight later a handful of new tokens arrives, you sell on the open. Nothing went wrong at any step — and the balance afterwards is slightly smaller than the balance before.
Money does not disappear in one dramatic moment here. It seeps out along the route, a little at each stage. This page walks the route in order — locking up, farming points, claiming, selling — and for each stage says what leaks, what the rule text behind it actually says, and what you can verify yourself. The detail lives in the individual guides; this one is the map.
The rule wording quoted below comes from Binance's Chinese-language help centre pages, checked 2026-09, and is rendered into English here; the English-language pages are separate documents and may word the same rules differently, so read the version for your own language before acting. Thresholds, points tiers and fee rates change by round and by account level — the current announcement and the fee page at the time are what count. Programmes are not available in every market, and eligibility follows your local terms. No returns are quoted anywhere on this page.
01The lock-up: the money is not trapped, something else leaks
The part people worry about most is the part that matters least. Binance's Launchpool introduction puts it plainly: to redeem, you tap Unlock, and assets can be redeemed at any time. There is no waiting for the programme to end.
Which means the loss in this stage has nothing to do with funds being stuck. Two things are genuinely costing you. First, across those days you are holding an asset because a rule told you to, and it moves in price on its own. Second, that money is not doing whatever it would otherwise have done. Neither appears on a statement. To turn the second one into a number, the opportunity cost of locking BNB takes it apart.
A low entry bar is not the same as a low cost, either. The same page puts the minimum at 0.01 tokens to take part, but that figure is the general floor written on the introduction page — any given round sets its own threshold in its own announcement (checked 2026-09). What decides your cost is never the published minimum; it is how much you actually committed and for how long.
One line gets skipped a lot: rewards accrue by the hour, and you can move them to your spot account whenever you like. The flip side of hourly accrual is that leaving early leaves part of the reward behind. So every "should I just pull out" moment during the lock-up is two decisions wearing one coat — a price call and a reward call. A workable way to size it is to keep the lock-up small enough that a 50% drawdown over the period would be merely annoying. Beyond that size, it is the price that ends up making the decision for you halfway through.
02The points: the score is bought with real trades
Programmes that run on points have a completely different cost shape. The Alpha points FAQ gives the arithmetic: your total is the sum of the daily points earned over the past 15 days, and the daily figure combines a balance component and a trading-volume component.
The balance component is banded by how much you hold; the volume component has to be earned by actually placing orders. Both the bands and the thresholds vary by round, and this page deliberately quotes none of them — but the shape is stable. Parking funds alone usually will not get you there. Trading will.
And trading has friction. The spot fee page works its example on the assumption of an ordinary user at 0.1% — a tenth of a percent, in round terms — while the tier that actually applies to you depends on VIP level and discount method, as shown on the fee page at the time (checked 2026-09). The same page notes a discount for paying fees in BNB; the figure printed there currently works out at a quarter off, and that too is set by the page rather than by anything permanent.
Put those side by side and the picture is unglamorous: every trade you place to push a score upward pays your tier's fee plus the spread. One trade is invisible. Forty trades is a line item. This is exactly the cost that turns up as a throwaway remark in points-farming tutorials — rewards barely covering the grind — and never as its own calculation. To fold that friction and your hours into a single number, see what an airdrop actually costs.
03The claim: confirming is what spends the points
This is the one irreversible step on the route, and the one most often treated as a formality: spending the points is your choice, and it settles the instant you confirm — the choice and the irreversibility sit on the same button. The wording behind that comes from the points FAQ, which states that confirming participation in an Alpha event — an Alpha airdrop or a TGE, for instance — consumes your Alpha points immediately, and that consuming them is something you choose.
Everything the score cost you — fees, spread, a fortnight of attention — converts in that tap into one shot at an allocation, and whether the tokens are worth it is only knowable later.
Clearing the bar is also not the same as receiving anything. The document sets out two phases: in the first, users above a threshold may claim within a limited window; in the second, the threshold drops and claims run first come, first served. The thresholds appear as placeholders in the text, set per round. And one more line worth keeping: the overall airdrop period may run beyond 24 hours — that is the length of the whole distribution period, not the claim window a single round gives you, so the two "24 hours" are different parameters. A first-come queue stretched over more than a day means your threshold bought you a place in line, not an allocation — and when you join that line matters.
If your problem is the other kind — you held the asset and still came up ineligible — that is usually not the claim at all but how eligibility was measured. That one is covered in how airdrop snapshots are actually taken.
04The sale: the fee lands twice, not once
Most write-ups stop at "received". But the net result is only fixed once you have sold — and the fee lands twice on the way, once on the token you just bought and once on the currency you get back when you sell. The wording behind that is in Binance's spot trading fee page carries a sentence almost no guide repeats: the trading fee is always paid in the asset you receive. Buy ETH with USDC and the fee comes out of the ETH; sell ETH for USDC and it comes out of the USDC.
During a points push, those two bites multiply by however many round trips you made.
A hypothetical example, purely to show the arithmetic: 20 trades placed to build volume, USD 200 notional each, the round trip estimated generously at 0.2% all in for fees and spread — roughly USD 8 of friction. Before any of this round is yours, the reward has to clear that 8, then clear the price exposure and the opportunity cost from the lock-up. The figures are invented and use the same assumption set as the cost breakdown linked above, so the two pages can be read side by side; your own tier is whatever the fee page shows you on the day.
The other half of the outcome is the price, which no rule document governs. Selling immediately and holding both have arguments behind them, and selling a token that opened below listing price works through that choice. One thing to flag here: valuing the reward at the number circulating when the round was announced is the single most expensive bookkeeping mistake of the four stages.
05Four lines to fill in before you commit
These are not points to absorb. They are blanks to fill. Whichever line you cannot complete is the part of this round you have not checked yet.
- How much, and for how long. If this sum halved over the period, would it change anything you care about? If yes, it is the size itself that does not fit this round.
- Where the score comes from. Is the balance component enough on its own, or do you have to trade your way up? How many orders, and roughly what does that cost at your tier? A line you cannot complete means the cost of this round is still an unknown.
- Before the confirm button. What do the points buy at this moment: priority claiming, or a place in a first-come queue? How long is the window? Take it from the current round's page, not from your memory of the last one.
- When you intend to sell. Fix the exit point first, then value the reward at that point, and put both fee bites in.
One leak sits outside all four lines: someone offering to sell you an insider allocation, or to run the round on your behalf. Official allocations follow the rules printed in each round's announcement, and an allocation offered outside that announcement has no rule behind it — insider launch allocations for sale and spotting a fake airdrop unpack those pitches.
Fill in all four and go read the announcement. Stall halfway and what is missing is the basis for the decision — skipping costs nothing, which is more than can be said for any of the four stages above.
This page maps rules and cost structure. It is not investment advice and forecasts nothing about any round. Reward quantities, distribution timing, token prices and programme rules all change, and the net can easily come out negative; the asset you hold to qualify carries its own price risk, and new tokens can fall below listing price or go to zero. Every figure in the example is hypothetical. Whether to join, how much to commit and when to stop are your calls and your risk.
Rule wording checked 2026-09-20. Everything above was verified against official help-centre pages rather than a first-hand run through the process; help pages and programme pages change, so treat whatever they show you on the day as current.