How much is BNB worth right now?

Born on an exchange in 2017

BNB was launched in July 2017 by Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that opened that same year. It was first sold to the public in an initial coin offering and began life as a token on Ethereum. Its original name was Binance Coin; these days it simply goes by its ticker, BNB.

Binance later built a blockchain of its own and moved BNB onto it. Today BNB is the native coin of BNB Chain, a network that runs smart contracts in a way compatible with Ethereum’s tools.

What people use BNB for

• Network fees. Every transaction on BNB Chain is paid for in BNB.
• Exchange discounts. Binance customers can pay their trading fees in BNB at a reduced rate, which was the coin’s first job.
• Staking. Validators lock up BNB to produce blocks and keep the chain secure, and holders can delegate theirs to them.

Those three roles explain most of the demand for the coin, and they also explain why news about Binance itself tends to show up in BNB’s chart.

A supply designed to shrink

BNB started with 200 million coins and none are mined. Instead of adding new ones, the project takes coins out of circulation through burns, sending them to an address no one can spend from. Binance has set a goal of eventually cutting the total to 100 million BNB.

A burn happens every quarter, sized by a formula tied to BNB’s price and the number of blocks produced, and part of the fees paid on BNB Chain is burned as well. Burned coins sit in plain view on the blockchain, so anyone can check that each burn happened and how much it removed. The current supply stands at 133.16M BNB.

BNB next to bitcoin

Bitcoin adds new coins until it reaches 21 million. BNB went the other way: all 200 million existed from the start, and the number only falls. That is unusual among large cryptocurrencies, most of which keep creating coins for years. Neither design makes one coin’s price directly comparable with the other’s.

One BNB costs $730.15 at the moment. What decides its place in the market is total value, the price multiplied by the coins in circulation, and on that count BNB is number 4. Lining up those totals, as our coins page does, is a fairer way to compare any two cryptocurrencies than looking at single-coin prices.