BNB

BNB is the coin of BNB Chain and the Binance exchange, used to pay fees and get trading discounts.

BNB was created by Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges, and sold in a token sale that funded its 2017 launch. The token first appeared on 5 July 2017 as an Ethereum (ERC-20) token, and the token sale began a few days earlier. Binance used BNB as a discount token for trading fees. It later moved BNB to its own blockchains: BNB Smart Chain (BSC) began producing blocks on 29 August 2020, and the older Beacon Chain was shut down in November 2024.

BNB started with a fixed supply of 200 million coins, and no new BNB is created. The supply shrinks through quarterly burns, which destroy coins permanently, and through a small burn of network fees in every block. After the 36th quarterly burn on 15 July 2026, about 133.17 million BNB remained, and burning continues until 100 million are left. The 2017 plan tied burns to Binance's profits; today a formula based on the BNB price and the number of blocks sets the amount.

Today BNB pays transaction fees on BSC, its Layer 2 network opBNB and the Greenfield storage network. Holders can stake it with the chain's validators, whose rewards come from those fees. On Binance, BNB lowers trading fees and gives access to token launches and airdrops. BSC is widely used for stablecoin transfers, trading apps and tokenised assets.

BNB Chain is developed in the open under the bnb-chain GitHub organisation, but Binance remains closely tied to it: it created the token and the chain, and Binance-labelled wallets held about a quarter of all BNB in September 2026. Binance is led by co-CEOs Richard Teng and Yi He. Its founder Changpeng Zhao stepped down in 2023 after a US settlement over money-laundering and sanctions failures, and was pardoned in October 2025.