Binance Coin Price Index

Binance Coin (BNB) is the native crypto asset of the Binance ecosystem. Binance began as essentially just a crypto exchange, but it has since branched out its offerings. It launched Binance Coin in 2017 via an initial coin offering (ICO). BNB is the main asset for Binance’s platform, serving a number of roles, including as a method of fee reduction on the exchange and as a currency in which to pay fees for activities on Binance Coin’s main blockchain, Binance Chain (BC), and its sister chain, Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

BNB history

Binance got its start in 2017, quickly launching an ICO in which it sold and allocated BNB tokens. Back then, Binance Coin was an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. However, Binance launched a mainnet blockchain, Binance Chain, in 2019 with BNB as its coin. A token swap was conducted to change ERC-20 BNB tokens over to Binance Chain-based BNB coins. In 2020, Binance Smart Chain took flight as a separate compatible blockchain alongside Binance Chain.

Binance blockchains, explained

Binance Chain, the original blockchain mainnet of the Binance ecosystem, was built with on-chain trading in mind. Binance’s decentralized exchange (DEX), Binance DEX, runs on BC. The functionality of this type of blockchain, however, is limited. To offer different features, Binance Smart Chain was launched. BSC has Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) functionality.

Assets built on BC are called BEP-2 tokens, while assets built on BSC are known as BEP-20 tokens.

Binance Coin price

BNB’s value fluctuates, as is evident in the Binance Coin price chart above. Several factors potentially impact the price of BNB, given the asset’s broad range of use cases along with the speculatory nature of the crypto industry. Among BNB’s list of uses is functioning as a vehicle for fee payments on-chain and as money via Binance’s payments card.

Binance also burns some of its profits in the form of Binance Coin each quarter, which is expected to carry on until the maximum BNB coin supply drops to 100 million, down from its initial count of 200 million. Binance also has an initiative called the BNB Pioneer Burn Program that helps certain Binance Coin holders who have unrecoverably lost BNB due to a mistake, under certain specific conditions. At times, Binance may send holders Binance Coin to replace what they lost and then deduct that amount of BNB from the next burn.

For Binance Coin news, see Cointelegraph’s Binance Coin tag.