Binance goes left, OKX goes right: Alibaba and Tencent repeat their history in ecological layout

Original author: YettaS (X: @YettaSing)

As an observer across time and space, I seem to see the shadows of Alibaba and Tencent in the Web2 era in the strategic layout of Binance and OKX. One is promoting scale expansion with a high degree of dominance, and the other is continuously extending the ecological territory with open connections. Although they are in completely different industries and times, the strategic trajectories of these business giants are surprisingly similar.

1. BN: Highly Dominant and Promotes Scale

Binance has always been a leader in our industry. If you get investment from Binance, you will be labeled as Binance. If you are rooted in BSC, you will be considered as Binances own project. Launchpool will give so many tokens to $BNB holders. If the listing project is not doing well, you will blame Binance first instead of the project.

Binance, overshadowing everything, becomes the biggest brand.

In fact, the rise of the BSC ecosystem in the last cycle is a better example: Pancake and Venus directly seized the biggest hot spot on ETH and pushed forward with all their strength, and then various ecological projects copied and pasted in the shortest time. Stepn migrated to BSC as soon as Solana became popular to take over Defi. The entire BSC has achieved rapid scale under high control.

2. OKX: Open connections to expand the ecological boundaries

On the contrary, OKX is more open and lightweight in its ecological layout. On the one hand, the layout of wallet attracts users to become a traffic entrance, and on the other hand, it uses wallet to connect various ecosystems. After the launch of Ordinal in May last year, it has been advancing rapidly, greatly promoting the popularity of the entire track; this year, it has connected to Ton at the fastest speed, and announced OKX Connect as the current highest strategy of wallet some time ago, helping all EVM dapps to enter the Telegram ecosystem as quickly as possible. OKX does not directly control or copy any project. They have become the invisible infrastructure of the industry through open source code and open APIs, fully connecting projects with projects and projects with users.

3. Alibaba has no allies and Tencent has no control

This strong control and open approach is exactly the same as when we discussed the differences between Alibaba and Tencent. The most common phrase back then was Alibaba has no allies, and Tencent has no control.

Taking new retail as an example, Alibabas layout model tends to be centralized, and it achieves comprehensive control over management and operations through deep holdings in invested companies. For example, the full acquisition of Ele.me, the controlling stake in Intime Retail, and the large-scale holding of Sanjiang Shopping all show that Alibaba hopes to vertically integrate the new retail ecosystem through the dual power of capital and technology. This centralized layout reflects Alibabas strong desire to dominate and seek to ensure the overall coordination of the new retail ecosystem by controlling management rights and discourse power.

Tencents strategy is significantly different. Its core lies in decentralization, building an open business ecosystem as a connector. Through mini-programs, payments, big data, advertising and other portals, Tencent has built a complete set of new retail toolboxes to help all kinds of companies complete digital transformation on the basis of low cost and high efficiency. Tencents shareholding ratio in the invested companies is usually small. For example, Tencent only held 5% of Yonghui Supermarkets shares, and its shareholding ratio in JD.com was less than 20%, which was far lower than Alibabas controlling shareholding ratio.

4. Different Starts and Different Paths

So, why did such completely different layout thinking and operation modes emerge?

Alibaba started out as an e-commerce Unternehmen, and its vision of making business easy runs through the entire process. Its core concept is to reshape industry rules through the integration of technology and resources. This kind of thinking inevitably makes Alibaba play a leading role in the entire ecosystem. Through the in-depth transformation of B-end stores, Alibaba hopes to achieve all-round ecological synergy and maximize traffic effects and resource utilization. It can be said that Alibaba is a transformer that uses control to achieve the reconstruction and upgrading of enterprises and their industries.

Tencents core competitiveness lies in its social and traffic ecology. Social networking itself is a kind of connection . It provides good enough tools and leaves the rest to users. Therefore, in the ecological layout, Tencent also enables all enterprises to achieve digital transformation by providing traffic, payment, data and other tools. In this process, the key is to consolidate and expand its own traffic and data entrances through the advantages of connectors.

In fact, we can also see the difference from the organizational perspective. Back then, Zhang Yong lived in a hotel in Hangzhou for more than ten years for Alibaba, but Tencent made Guangzhou the headquarters of WeChat for Zhang Xiaolong. From this aspect, we can also see a hint of their respective characteristics.

5. Different industries encounter historical similarities

Like Alibaba, Binance has the mission of maintaining the first place in the industry around its core business. Binance calls CEX the main site, and everything about it needs to run around the main logic of CEX. $BNB is the carrier of all this. For example, this year, $BNB on BNBchain can also participate in Launchpool, which is a kind of guidance. Binance needs trading traffic. The most effective way is to continue to benefit, find scenarios (such as BSC), cultivate projects through incubation, investment, resource import, etc., and finally harvest. The Dream Factory is the most effective model to maintain the traffic + brand matrix, and dreaming must mean strong control.

OKX does not have the pressure of being the first in the industry, and it chooses to take a more technological + compliance path. Star mentioned in his latest speech that OKXs three business lines are CEX, Web3 and Simple. Unlike Binance, OKX does not force Web3 to be deeply bound to CEX, but tries to let Web3 independently take a technology-driven path. This is obviously to achieve the fastest and most efficient ecological capture, and wallet has become a key tool for OKX, the core portal for capturing and connecting the entire Web3 ecosystem.

Of course, the direction of strategy can never be predicted at a glance. No one can embark on a bright road with a wave of the hand on the first day. This process is always full of internal and external pressures and variables. What is needed is rapid round trip and trial and error.

Tencent and 360 once had a 3Q war, forcing users to choose between two options, which was criticized by the market and eventually stopped due to government intervention; it also tried B2C e-commerce Paipai in the early stage, and finally sold it to JD.com in exchange for a 15% stake in JD.com. When its social network and traffic moat are deep enough, it will find that using traffic to connect is more suitable than doing everything by itself. Such ambitions also exist in Krypto. OKX once lost its advantage due to regulatory pressure and did not go overseas in the first time. OKexChain also hoped to expand its internal ecology and share a share in the public chain world. Wallet also hoped to build its own DEX to convert traffic, but all ended in failure. Many times, we are unwilling to obey our own genes.

A historical similarity is reflected in different eras and different industries.

Behind the two models, what is reflected is the choEis of enterprises in dealing with different external environments. Binance and Alibaba both focus on the dominance of their core businesses, rely on strong control and resource integration capabilities to promote ecological Entwicklung, and ensure their voice and scale expansion in the industry through a full stack approach. OKX and Tencent, on the other hand, have chosen a strategy centered on openness and connection, empowering the ecosystem with technical tools and platforms, weakening direct control while taking themselves as part of the ecological infrastructure, promoting free interaction between projects and users, and thus achieving rapid ecological capture.

These two models are not formed by chance, but are derived from different product genes and missions of enterprises. One emphasizes control and resource integration, and seeks to protect industry status through large-scale monopoly; the other emphasizes decentralization and connectivity, and uses the self-growth of the ecosystem to continue to grow.

In different industries and at different points in time, business giants can always find the optimal path that suits their own genes.

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