BNB

BNB Smart Chain ships upgrades at a steady pace. The Fermi hard fork in January 2026 cut block times to 0.45 seconds, and the Pasteur hard fork on 25 August 2026 changed how blocks are built, with about 28% more gas per block in its first weeks. Client releases continued through August 2026. The weak point is the company behind the token. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act, served a four-month prison sentence and was pardoned in October 2025. Binance is now led by co-CEOs Richard Teng, a former Singapore regulator, and co-founder Yi He. In April 2026 a US senator questioned the status of Binance's compliance monitors after reports of Iran-linked flows.

• Fermi Hard Fork Accelerates BSC to 0.45-Second Block Times
• Post-Pasteur Hard Fork: BSC Packs 28% More Gas Per Block, With More Scale Ahead
• bnb-chain/bsc GitHub Releases
• Binance founder Changpeng Zhao sentenced to four months in prison (CNBC)
• Meet Binance's new co-CEO Yi He (CNBC)
• Senator presses DOJ and Treasury over status of Binance monitors (Fortune)

Institutional access is new and still small. The SEC declared the VanEck BNB ETF (VBNB) effective on 27 May 2026; Anchorage Digital is its BNB custodian, BitGo was added as a second custodian in August 2026 (no BNB had been moved to it by 11 September), and the fund says it does not stake its BNB. In Europe the 21Shares BNB ETP held about $13.6M on 16 September 2026. The largest listed corporate holder, CEA Industries (Nasdaq: BNC), reported 515,544 BNB at 30 April 2026, and The Block's tracker lists Thailand's Brooker Group with 43,022 BNB. Ownership is dominated by Binance itself: Binance-labelled wallets held about 25.5% of supply in September 2026, including customer deposits, and a 2023 Forbes analysis reported that ICO buyers received far fewer tokens than advertised.

• VanEck BNB ETF - Form S-1/A
• VanEck BNB ETF - Form 424B3 (BitGo)
• 21shares Binance BNB ETP
• CEA Industries FY2026 results (SEC exhibit)
• The Block: BNB treasury companies
• BscScan Top Accounts by BNB Balance
• How Binance Turned Its Failed Token ICO Into A Billion-Dollar Windfall (Forbes)

BNB has no inflation: supply started at 200 million and no new coins are issued. Quarterly burns and a per-block burn of part of the gas fees have removed about 66.83 million BNB, roughly a third of the original supply, leaving 133,166,127.91 BNB after the 36th burn on 15 July 2026. Burns continue until 100 million remain. The burn amount now follows a formula based on the BNB price and the number of blocks, not Binance's profits, so higher prices mean fewer coins burned. There are no pending unlocks. The main caveat is concentration: much of the supply sits in Binance-controlled wallets.

• 36th BNB Burn
• Binance Whitepaper
• BEP-95: Introduce Real-Time Burning Mechanism
• BscScan Top Accounts by BNB Balance

BNB Smart Chain is one of the most used networks. On 16 September 2026 DefiLlama showed about $5.48B locked in its DeFi apps (fourth among chains), about $13.8B of stablecoins and about $37.8B of DEX volume over 30 days. BNB Chain says payment transactions appear in about 99.6% of blocks, and it reports over $19B of tokenised stock trading since launch. Interest-based lending protocols hold a large share of DeFi deposits. Most activity figures here come from an aggregator (DefiLlama) or from BNB Chain itself.

• BSC - DeFi TVL, Fees & Revenue (DefiLlama)
• DefiLlama: Stablecoins by chain
• DefiLlama: BSC DEX volume
• BSC Payment Lane: Reserved Blockspace That Keeps Payments Moving
• BNB Chain Market Making Landscape: Liquidity Venues and How to Integrate