Binance Coin (BNB) is the token of the exchange with the same name (Binance), one of the largest crypto exchanges.
Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao (CZ). The company was originally based in China, but moved its servers and headquarters from China to Japan in the run-up to the Chinese government’s ban on cryptocurrency trading in September 2017. On March 4, 2018, the company had opened offices in Taiwan.
In a crowdsale (ICO), Binance sold 100 million BNB (50% of the total supply). Half of the funds raised through the crowdsale were for branding and marketing Binance. About one-third of the funds were used for platform upgrades and development.
The Binance Coin can be used to save on transaction fees on Binance. If one uses the token, one saves 50% of all transaction fees in the first year. This value halves year after year until it finally drops to 0% in the fifth year.
Originally, the coin was issued as a token on Ethereum. Since then, however, Binance has created its own blockchain, called the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It works very similarly to the Ethereum blockchain and helped the token skyrocket in the spring of 2021.
Binance conducts a so-called “coin burning” every quarter, which destroys all coins that have been used so far. With this, Binance regulates the number of coins. This burning is to be carried out until 50% of the 200 million originally issued coins are still available.
Crowdsale
Binance pre-mined 200 million Binance Coins prior to the public sale. Binance Coin’s distribution process had three phases: allocation to founders, allocation to investors, and a public sale.
Founders received 80 million BNB (40% of supply) vested over four years. Half of the founders’ allocation was vested immediately. The other half is vested annually through 2021. From Q2 2019, these tokens will be burnt through quarterly burns and will thus remain illiquid until they are burnt. Binance plans to burn 100 million BNB (50% of supply) over time and has successfully executed nine coin burns to date.
Investors receive 20 million BNB (10% of supply) with no vesting or lock-up restrictions.
The public sale distributed 100 million BNB (50% of supply). Binance launched the ERC-20 Binance Coin in a public sale on July 14, 2017. Half of the funds raised through Binance’s coin offering were intended for Binance branding and marketing, and roughly one-third of the funds were for platform upgrades and development.
Binance executed the token swap from ERC-20 BNB tokens to Binance chain mainnet BNB coins on April 23, 2019. Binance Coins native to the Binance chain are called BEP2 BNB. Pre-selected validators produced blocks after the genesis block on April 18, 2019, and the first ERC-20 to BEP2 BNB swap of 5 million BNB was executed to a wallet belonging to Binance.
