BNB Primer: The Token Powering the World’s Largest Crypto Exchange
Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who began his career building trading systems for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In 2019, the company launched its token, BNB, and created its own blockchain: the BNB Smart Chain. The token was initially used by crypto investors to obtain discounts on the Binance exchange, but it quickly developed additional use cases in an ever-expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications. BNB is the third-largest token by market cap at $47 billion[1] (ex. stablecoins), and we believe it poses a serious challenge to Ethereum’s market dominance, after overtaking Tron as the blockchain with the most daily active users to end 2023.[2]
Future Growth Potential
Binance faced major headwinds in 2023 and recently reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Changpeng Zhao stepped down as CEO and the company paid more than $4.3 billion in financial penalties—Richard Teng has since been appointed CEO to lead the company going forward. Teng has extensive regulatory experience including 13 years with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and 7 years as Chief Regulatory Officer of SGX Group. Despite the regulatory scrutiny, Binance has remained the world’s largest crypto exchange facilitating $3.8 trillion in spot transactions in 2023, more than 8.3x the volume of Coinbase in the same time period.[3] The exchange reported 40 million new users in 2023, more than a 30% increase YoY.[4]
In addition to exchange growth, we also see significant BNB adoption increasing, as applications with multiple use cases come to fruition on the network.
Favorable BNB Tokenomics
BNB uses quarterly and fixed-ratio burning procedures that remove tokens from circulation, in order to boost the scarcity and thus the value of the remaining supply. More than 50 million tokens have been burned to date, reducing the circulating supply to about 150 million.[6] BNB maintains favorable supply-limiting tokenomics, compared to other protocols with unlimited inflation.
Unique Access via the Osprey BNB Chain Trust
Despite Binance’s success in maintaining the top spot among crypto exchanges for trading volume, difficulties remain in accessing the BNB token in the U.S. The Osprey BNB Chain Trust provides accredited investors with easy and secure access to BNB—because of recent regulatory actions, BNB is no longer available for retail trading on U.S. exchanges and the Trust may end up being the only vehicle for U.S. investors to access exposure to the token. If you are interested in learning more about Osprey Funds and our investment offerings, please visit our website here or contact us at IR@ospreyfunds.io.