What Is BNB?
BNB powers the BNB Chain ecosystem and is the native coin of the BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain.
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BNB powers the BNB Chain ecosystem and is the native coin of the BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain. BNB has several use cases:
- Reduced trading fees on the Binance exchange;
- Pay for trading fees on Binance DEX (Decentralized Exchange);
- Pay for transaction fees on the BNB Beacon Chain;
- Pay for transaction fees on the BNB Smart Chain;
- Pay for goods and services for both online and in-store purchases (e.g., using Binance Card or Binance Pay);
- Book hotels, flights, and more at Travala.com;
- Community utility token on the BNB Chain ecosystem (such as games and DApps);
- Participate in token sales hosted on the Binance Launchpad;
- Donate on Binance Charity;
- Provide liquidity on Binance Liquid Swap.
What is BNB?
BNB was launched through an Initial Coin Offering (or ICO) that took place from June 26th to July 3rd, 2017 - 11 days before the Binance Exchange opened for trading. The issue price was 1 ETH for 2,700 BNB or 1 BTC for 20,000 BNB. Although BNB was launched through an ICO, BNB does not provide users with a claim on Binance profits and does not represent an investment in Binance.
BNB was originally issued as an ERC-20 token, running on the Ethereum network, with a total supply of 200 million coins. 100 million BNB was offered in the ICO, but the current total supply is lower due to periodic burning events and a real-time burning mechanism. If you want to know more about coin burns, and why BNBs are being permanently destroyed, check out What Is a Coin Burn?.
Although initially based on the Ethereum network, the ERC-20 BNB tokens were later swapped with BEP-2 BNB at a 1:1 ratio. The BEP-2 BNB is the native coin of the Binance Chain, and the mainnet launch was announced on April 18th, 2019.
In September 2020, Binance launched the BNB Smart Chain (BSC, former Binance Smart Chain), a blockchain network that runs in parallel with the BNB Beacon Chain. This means that you can now find BNB in three different forms:
- BNB BEP-2 on the BNB Beacon Chain (former Binance Chain).
- BNB BEP-20 on the BNB Smart Chain(former Binance Smart Chain).
- BNB ERC-20 on the Ethereum network.
What is BNB used for?
As mentioned, BNB has many use cases both within the BNB Chain ecosystem and elsewhere, so it is up to you to decide how to use your BNB. For instance, you can use BNB to pay for your travel expenses, buy virtual gifts, and much more. We estimated that millions of BNB had been consumed by users for travel expenses, payment of goods, for lending, for rewards, to create smart contracts, and for other transactions.
Many people also use BNB to pay transaction fees. On Binance’s trading platform alone, approximately two million users have used BNB to pay for trading fees totaling more than 40 million BNB on more than 127 billion trades. Let’s take a look at how BNB can help you with trading fees.
When trading cryptocurrencies on the Binance Exchange, each trade will incur a standard fee of 0.1% (trading fees are determined by your monthly trading volume and BNB holdings). You can either pay the trading fees using the assets you are trading, or you can pay for them with BNB. If you choose to pay in BNB, you will get a special discount.
Therefore, if you trade a lot on Binance, you should consider getting BNB and using them to pay for your fees. Keep in mind that the deduction for trading fees follows a specific schedule, so make sure to check the current spot trading Fee Schedule. It's also worth noting that the Binance Futures platform follows a slightly different Fee Schedule.
Apart from discounted trading fees, BNB is also powering the Binance DEX (on the Binance Beacon Chain) and hundreds of applications that are running on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC), which means that you can use BNB outside the Binance trading platform as well. Indeed, more than 180 digital assets have been issued on BSC, and millions of users have consumed BNB for utility purposes in connection with BSC.
Where do I get BNB?
Most purchases of BNB occur in the secondary market. That means that you can buy and sell BNB on Binance.com and on other crypto platforms.
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