Binance, introduced in July 2017, holds the title of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume. Its mission is to push cryptocurrency exchanges into a central role in the global financial sphere. The name "Binance" is a fusion of "Binary" and "Finance," reflecting this new era in financial transactions.
Beyond just being a massive crypto exchange, Binance has developed a comprehensive ecosystem of services for its users. This ecosystem includes the Binance Chain, Binance Smart Chain, Binance Academy, Trust Wallet, and several research initiatives. Each of these utilizes blockchain technology to bring innovative financial solutions to the forefront. BNB plays a crucial role in ensuring the smooth operation of many of these Binance projects.
Who Are the Founders of BNB?
Changpeng Zhao is the mastermind behind Binance, serving as its CEO. His journey began in 2001 when he joined Bloomberg as the head of Tradebook futures development, where he worked for four years before partnering with Fusion Systems.
Since 2013, Zhao has been deeply involved in blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency realm. He became the development lead at Blockchain and later founded BijieTech in 2015. Binance was officially launched in 2017 under his leadership, and he has remained the company's CEO.
He Yi is a co-founder and the chief marketing officer at Binance. She began her career in 2012 as a TV anchor for China Travel TV. By 2014, Yi co-founded OKCoin, which was China’s largest exchange for fiat-to-crypto conversions at that time. In 2017, she joined Changpeng Zhao, and together they established Binance, now the world's leading crypto exchange.
What Makes BNB Unique?
Binance stands out as a distinctive ecosystem built on decentralized, blockchain-based networks. It’s the top crypto exchange in several countries, with its affiliate organizations gaining ample attention.
One of Binance's key strengths is its commitment to innovation. Starting as a crypto exchange in 2017, Binance now extends its services across various sectors. According to its website, Binance aims to be the infrastructure service provider for the entire blockchain ecosystem.
Since BNB's introduction, there has been a noticeable surge in investor interest. The coin experienced a significant rise in value at the start of 2021, catching the eye of institutional investors.
Implementations like BEP-95 have enhanced the token's deflationary nature, making BNB even more deflationary. This proposal, similar to Ethereum's EIP-1559, reduces gas fees on the Binance Smart Chain by burning a portion of the fees, thereby increasing decentralization.
These efforts have helped Binance mitigate various protocol breaches on BSC, such as the $200 million exploit of Pancake Bunny and multiple hacks on Cream Finance. Despite these incidents, users continue to flock to Binance for its low fees and the plethora of attractive meme coins in its ecosystem.
What Is BNB’s Auto Burn?
In the cryptocurrency sector, a coin burn is a strategy used to permanently eliminate coins from circulation to create a deflationary effect. Many crypto projects, including Binance, regularly burn coins to maintain the value of their digital assets.
Binance started its coin burn program in late 2017 and has since removed over 38 million tokens through its quarterly burn events. The exchange plans to burn up to 100 million BNB tokens, which is half of its circulating supply.
BNB employs two burning mechanisms. The first involves burning a portion of tokens used for transaction fees on the BNB Chain, while the second involves quarterly BNB burns.
Previously, the quarterly burn was tied to the revenue from Binance's centralized exchange. However, with the new BNB Auto-Burn system, the burn quantity is determined by a formula based on the total blocks produced on the Binance Smart Chain and BNB's average price in dollars during the quarter.
As of July 2022, Binance has completed 20 burn events, destroying 38,683,447.66 BNB tokens and trimming its initial 200 million supply by 19.34%.
How Many BNB Are There in Circulation?
Initially, BNB had a maximum supply of 200,000,000 coins, with 168,137,036 currently in circulation as of September 2021.
Binance undergoes quarterly burns of BNB to cut the total supply by 50%, aiming for a total of 100,000,000 BNB. On July 18, 2021, the 16th quarterly burn took place, valued at $390 million in terms of BNB price at that time. Nonetheless, this wasn't the highest burn value; on April 16, 2021, Binance burned nearly $600 million worth of BNB.
According to Binance's whitepaper, half of the maximum BNB supply was allocated to the initial coin offering (ICO) and public sale when the coin launched in July 2017. During the ICO, the coin was priced at $0.10, raising $15 million. Today’s BNB price represents a return on investment of nearly 4200X. About 40% of BNB's total supply, approximately 80,000,000 coins, was reserved for the founding team. The remaining 10% was distributed among angel investors.
How Is the BNB Network Secured?
BNB initially launched as a standard ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Eventually, Binance introduced its own blockchain, and tokens were then issued from the Binance blockchain, secured by the Tendermint byzantine-fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism.
ERC-20 tokens are grounded in the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, which offers high scalability and supports smart contract functionality. However, the Binance blockchain does not support smart contracts. In contrast, the Bitcoin blockchain operates on a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, which is less efficient and requires considerable energy and computing resources.
Where Can You Buy BNB?
As Binance’s utility token, the easiest way to purchase BNB is through the Binance exchange. Binance offers the most extensive range of BNB trading pairs and competitive trading rates. With the rise of Play2Earn games, interest in the BNB to PHP rate has grown significantly. Alternatively, you can use Binance's exchange rate converter page. Popular BNB trading pairs include BNB/USD, BNB/GBP, BNB/AUD, BNB/CNY, BNB/JPY, and BNB/EUR.
