One important short-term goal of any cryptocurrency coin or token project is to get their offering listed on a major exchange. Unfortunately, the great competition in the space has led to a sense of desperation, and where there is visible desperation, predators are never far behind. Unscrupulous people can smell desperation, their goal being to use it to their own personal advantage. This is just a dark side of human nature that some choose to induldge rather than resist, and we find it everywhere, including in the cryptosphere.

So it is that the process to be listed on some major exchanges could only be described as a shakedown. Preying on desperation, these exchanges are demanding more and more money, often through oblique and dishonest schemes, for the privilege of listing. And in some cases, they don’t even list the coin after taking the money. In fact, Apollo Currency recently suffered such treatment at the hands of Kucoin Exchange.

Their luck was better with HitBTC who, $400,000 later, decided that Apollo Currency was a project that lived up to their quality expectations and deserved to be listed. By all rights the leadership at Apollo Currency should have been elated. But, having joined the McAfee Alliance and having been made aware of the litany of complaints from projects and users against HitBTC, something didn’t sit right.

The question they needed to ask themselves was a simple one: Is it alright if bad things happen to other people, so long as they don’t happen to us? It is an old question, perhaps one of the oldest, and still so many get the answer wrong. Apollo Currency got it right. Deciding that they could not, in good faith, partner with an entity with such a reputation, they declined to be listed.

John McAfee, founder of Team McAfee and spiritual godfather of the McAfee Alliance, published a video statement on Twitter imploring other, more honest, exchanges to “do the right thing” and list Apollo on their exchange. Doing so would send a strong message to crooks and crypto-opponents alike: the community will not stand by and allow the little guy to suffer due to the corruption of giants. Time will tell whether anyone takes McAfee up on his plea.

But regardless of the short-term outcome, the long-term prognosis for Apollo Currency is a bright one. But putting integrity ahead of personal gain, they have set the gold standard for behavior under these circumstances. Only good things can come from the success of a project built on such a foundation.

On the other hand, the future for HitBTC looks bleak. Too many reports have come in about this exchange to believe that they are acting in good faith. And much like the fruit of the poisonous tree, no good will come from their success. Fortunately for the cryptosphere, these things have a way of eventually catching up.