Binance Places Four Tokens Under Closer Review
Binance has placed AVA, Gains Network, Scroll and Towns Protocol on its Monitoring Tag list, increasing the risk that the four tokens could eventually be removed from the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange if they fail future listing reviews.
The exchange said the Monitoring Tags would be applied from September 4 following its latest project reviews. The affected assets are AVA, Gains Network’s GNS, Scroll’s SCR and Towns Protocol’s TOWNS.
A Monitoring Tag is not a delisting announcement. All four tokens remain available on Binance, and the exchange said other services involving them would not be affected by Thursday’s decision. The label does, however, move the projects into a higher-risk category where they will face closer and more frequent scrutiny.
Binance explicitly warns that Monitoring Tag tokens exhibit “notably higher volatility and risks” than other listed assets and may ultimately be delisted if they cease to satisfy its standards.
The exchange evaluates significantly more than price performance when conducting those reviews. Its criteria include the project team’s commitment, the level and quality of development, trading volume and liquidity, network security, smart-contract stability, public communication and responsiveness to Binance’s due-diligence requests.
Binance also considers material or unjustified increases in token supply, changes to tokenomics, evidence of unethical or fraudulent conduct or negligence, and whether a project contributes to what it considers a healthy and sustainable crypto ecosystem.
Crucially, Binance did not say which criterion caused any of the four projects to receive the tag. There is therefore no basis to conclude from the announcement that AVA, Gains Network, Scroll or Towns was flagged because of misconduct, a security incident or any other specific issue.
Market data nevertheless provide some clues about areas Binance could be examining.
AVA, the token associated with the Travala travel ecosystem, has a market capitalization of about $14.6 million and trades roughly 97% below its April 2021 all-time high. More importantly for Binance’s liquidity criterion, Binance itself currently accounts for only a small part of AVA’s reported trading activity. CoinGecko recently showed about $159,000 in 24-hour AVA/USDT volume on Binance, compared with more than $8 million across the market.
There was an earlier warning sign on Binance’s own market. The exchange removed the AVA/BTC spot pair in May as part of a periodic review in which poor liquidity and trading volume were among the factors Binance said could lead to pair removals. That action did not delist AVA itself.
At the same time, AVA does not appear to be an abandoned project. The AVA Foundation reported in August that its Smart Program had more than 161,000 members and almost 10 million AVA locked. It also disclosed a July buyback of 488,423 AVA.
Gains Network presents another mixed picture.
GNS has fallen more than 96% from its 2023 peak and has a market capitalization of only around $10.6 million. Binance’s GNS/USDT market recently generated roughly $173,000 of 24-hour trading volume, while total GNS spot volume across tracked venues was just above $500,000.
Yet the underlying Gains Network protocol remains considerably more active than the token’s valuation alone might suggest. DeFiLlama data show around $10.2 million in total value locked and roughly $1.14 billion of perpetual-futures volume over the previous 30 days. The protocol generated around $426,000 in fees during the same period.
That makes it difficult to attribute the tag simply to a lack of product usage.
Scroll faces a different problem. SCR was already treated as a higher-risk asset when Binance listed it in October 2024 with a Seed Tag. At the time, Binance described SCR as a relatively new token that could experience unusually high volatility.
Since then, its market valuation has fallen sharply. SCR recently traded around 98% below its December 2024 record high, with a market capitalization of only about $4.5 million despite a maximum token supply of 1 billion.
Activity on the Scroll network has also become relatively small. Recent DeFiLlama figures put DeFi TVL near $9.3 million, with fewer than 1,000 active addresses over 24 hours and daily decentralized-exchange volume around $500,000.
Binance had already removed SCR/FDUSD in January and SCR/BTC in February during separate trading-pair reviews where liquidity and volume were among the factors considered.
TOWNS is the youngest of the four. Binance added Towns Protocol to several services in August 2025 after distributing TOWNS through its HODLer Airdrops programme. Just over a year later, the token has a market capitalization of about $5.3 million compared with a fully diluted valuation of roughly $25 million and trades about 96% below its record high.
Taken together, the four additions give Binance traders a warning rather than a deadline: the tokens remain listed, but their continued place on the exchange can no longer be treated as assured.
The Common Thread May Be Smaller Markets, Not Broken Projects
There is a temptation whenever Binance applies a Monitoring Tag to search for a scandal.
The wording encourages it. Binance’s review criteria include attacks, negligent behaviour, unexplained token-supply changes and even fraudulent conduct. When four projects suddenly appear on the list, the immediate question is naturally: what did they do?
The available evidence suggests a less dramatic explanation may be at least as important.
All four tokens have suffered extraordinary compression in market value. AVA, GNS, SCR and TOWNS are each roughly 96% to 98% below their respective all-time highs. Their current market capitalizations range from only about $4 million to $15 million.
That matters for an exchange.
A token can have an active development team and a functioning product while becoming increasingly unattractive to a major centralized marketplace. If order books thin out, volumes fall and market-maker participation weakens, maintaining the listing creates a worse trading environment and makes the asset more vulnerable to sharp moves.
Scroll is perhaps the clearest example. There is still visible development and governance activity around the Ethereum Layer 2. The issue is that the economic footprint surrounding SCR has become dramatically smaller. Its roughly $4.5 million market capitalization looks very different from the expectations surrounding Scroll when Binance put the token through pre-market trading and listed it in 2024.
GNS is even more instructive because it shows why “dead project” is the wrong shorthand for a Monitoring Tag. Gains Network’s gTrade platform can process more than $1 billion of monthly leveraged trading volume while the token attached to the ecosystem has a market capitalization close to $10 million. Protocol usage and exchange-listing quality are not the same thing.
AVA tells a similar story. Its loyalty programme continues to report users, locked tokens and travel-related activity, but Binance already removed one AVA trading pair earlier this year and current Binance spot activity is modest.
For TOWNS, the speed of the deterioration is arguably the striking part. The token arrived through Binance’s own HODLer Airdrops programme only in August 2025. A little more than a year later, it is already under Monitoring Tag review and trades more than 96% below its peak.
That is also why the designation can become self-reinforcing.
Once traders know an asset carries explicit delisting risk, some will reduce exposure. Market makers may become more cautious, liquidity can deteriorate further and new buyers may avoid the token. The very warning designed to flag weak market conditions can therefore make those conditions harder to repair.
None of that means delisting is inevitable. Binance can remove Monitoring Tags if subsequent reviews improve, and the exchange has done so with other assets.
But the four projects now have something they did not have before September 4: a publicly visible test they need to pass repeatedly.
For AVA and GNS, the question may increasingly be whether real product usage can translate into sufficient token demand and exchange liquidity. For Scroll, it is whether network activity and SCR’s market relevance can recover after an extreme decline in valuation. For Towns, the challenge is demonstrating that a relatively young token can develop sustainable liquidity after its post-launch collapse.
The next important Binance announcement will therefore not be another price update. It will be whether any of these four names eventually lose the Monitoring Tag—or move from the monitoring list to the delisting list.