Binance Coin is a cryptocurrency issued by the Binance exchange and trades under the symbol BNB. As of the second quarter of 2022, Binance Exchange is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume at $7.6 billion.
How Binance Coin (BNB) Emerged
Binance Coin initially operated on the Ethereum blockchain with the ERC-20 standard, but was later migrated to its own blockchain. It was launched during the initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2017 and has a strict maximum of 200 million BNB tokens. Binance offered 10% or 20 million BNB tokens to angel investors, 40% or 80 million tokens to the founding team, and the remaining 50% or 100 million tokens were distributed to various ICO participants.
Almost half of the funds raised during the ICO process were intended for use in branding and marketing Binance, while about one third was used to create the Binance platform and carry out necessary ecosystem updates for Binance. Initially, BNB was based on the Ethereum network, but now the token is a cryptocurrency that operates on the Binance blockchain.
Although 100 million Binance tokens were initially offered during the ICO, the total supply has significantly decreased. The amount of tokens to be burned is automatically calculated using the Auto-Burn formula. This recording mechanism was introduced in the last quarter of 2021.
Previously, the burning of BNB reflected the use of tokens and the revenue generated on the centralized exchange Binance. As a result of community feedback, BNB Auto-Burn replaced the previous burning mechanism in favor of a more objective process, fully independent of the centralized exchange Binance. Moreover, BNB Chain will continue to burn part of the gas fee on BNB Chain in real-time.
Binance regularly holds coin destruction events. The last burning of BNB occurred on July 13, 2022, when Binance burned a total of 1,959,595.29 BNB, equivalent to tokens worth 444 million USD. This is the 20th quarterly burning of BNB by Binance. The total supply of BNB has decreased to 163,276,974.
Real-time information about the burning of BNB can be found at bnbburn.info, a third-party website created by the BNB community.
