Offensive Token on Binance Smart Chain: Should Binance Have Intervened?

Update 25 September 2026: This commentary first appeared on 28 February 2021. Since then, Binance Smart Chain has been renamed BNB Smart Chain, the Slave.Finance website is no longer reachable, and the SEC case against Ripple ended in August 2025. The section "What has changed since 2021?" below covers what happened next.

Every now and then, we witness new coins arising. They usually run either on their own blockchain, or use other well-established ones to gain exposure, efficiency and use the already-in-use robust technology. In February 2021, an ugly case came to light: a racist token project surfaced on Twitter. It used Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the network developed by Binance. With Binance rising fast, the company suddenly faced two very hard choices.

What was going on with Binance?

Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange that launched in 2017. It later introduced its own cryptocurrency, Binance Coin (BNB), mainly used on the platform to pay fees and to trade. BNB started out as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, but later moved to Binance's own networks, Binance Chain and then Binance Smart Chain. Where BNB trades today is tracked on our BNB price prediction page.

In late February 2021, word surfaced about a project that was built on racism, called Slave.Finance. It used Black people as its mascot. Twitter filled with angry users demanding the immediate removal of the project and reporting its social media channels. At the time, the project claimed a market capitalisation of USD 14,690 and a total value locked of USD 45,161 for APY farming.

Should Binance Interfere?

In order to correctly assess if Binance should interfere, we need to throw that same old concept again, decentralization. If Binance would interfere and stop this project, Binance would be seen as a centralized company, interfering in its decentralized blockchain. Most cryptocurrency enthusiasts support blockchain’s real-life applications. Let’s take two potential solutions ahead:

• Binance interferes, blocks the project, but becomes tainted with centralization.
• Binance doesn’t interfere, and in turn becomes known as the holder of “dark cryptos”, pretty much like the dark web, which is illegal and in turn, brings more problems with countries across the world.

Binance and Ripple similarities?

Ripple was always a controversial company in the crypto sphere. It is a centralized company with a board of directors, next to a decentralized blockchain, the XRP Ledger. Many investors flee centralization, because for them it goes directly against the core value of cryptocurrencies. Believers in Ripple, on the other hand, think that a balance between both is the better alternative.

Binance's critics might want the company to step in and block a racist project, but in 2021 many argued this would go against cryptocurrencies as a whole. It was also not the first controversy for Binance: at the time, the exchange faced heated criticism over allegedly inflated trading volumes.

What's the solution?

In 2021, our answer was simple: stop giving attention to such projects. Crypto projects take off when media attention is handed to them. Supply and demand is the main driver for cryptos, and cutting off the demand for such a token ends it. The people behind this project would probably stop once nobody paid attention anymore. That attention might even have been the only reason they started it.

Asking Binance to intervene in bad projects was, in our view back then, like asking Bitcoin miners to refuse money laundering transactions. Intervention in decentralized projects should not be an option. Maybe we will see decentralized projects in the future that offer this kind of intervention by design.

What has changed since 2021?

Five years later, several of the questions in this piece have been answered by events:

• New name, same question. On 15 February 2022, Binance Smart Chain was renamed BNB Smart Chain and Binance Chain became BNB Beacon Chain, together branded BNB Chain. Binance described itself as only one contributor among many, and the number of validators rose from 21 to 41.
• The network was stopped once. On 6 October 2022, attackers exploited the BSC Token Hub bridge and minted around 2 million BNB, worth roughly USD 566 million at the time. The validators coordinated to halt BNB Smart Chain for about eight hours and shipped a patch that stopped the attacker from moving more funds. The episode showed that a small validator set can pause a chain, which is exactly the kind of central lever this article discussed.
• Ripple's case is closed. In July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sold on public exchanges was not offered as a security, while Ripple's direct institutional sales were. The court imposed a USD 125 million penalty in 2024, and in August 2025 both Ripple and the SEC dropped their appeals, which ended the case. Current XRP levels are on our XRP price prediction page.
• Slave.Finance is gone. Its domain no longer resolves, and the project played no further role. The demand-side answer from 2021 largely played out.

The core dilemma stays: every chain with a small, identifiable validator set can act against a token or a transaction, and every time it does, it trades a bit of neutrality for protection. Anyone choosing where to trade can compare how exchanges handle listings and delistings in our exchange comparison.

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