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What Is BNB (Binance Coin)? What To Know About This Crypto
ByCharles Lloyd Bovaird II Senior Contributor. Charles Lloyd Bovaird II is a financial writer focused on investments.
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Mar 15, 2025, 11:00am EDT
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Hand holding a Binance BNB Coin to represent the topic of what is BNB Binance?
BNB has many use cases and significant adoption, More
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BNB (formerly known as binance coin) is the native digital asset of BNB Chain, a blockchain ecosystem with a wide range of use cases. BNB is a utility token, in that it is used in many different functions of BNB chain, which consists of the blockchains BNB Smart Chain, BNB Greenfield and opBNB.
What Is BNB?
As a utility coin, BNB serves several purposes. More specifically, users can harness it to pay transaction fees at a reduced rate and interact with projects on the platform. They can also use it in governance, leveraging it to make decisions involving projects and protocols.
In addition, users can stake BNB, helping secure the network and earning rewards in the process. To take part, users are required to lock up their BNB, meaning they can’t sell or trade it for a certain time.
Further, users can harness BNB to benefit from airdrops, where they receive digital assets associated with new projects. To benefit from this, users can subscribe their BNB to Binance Simple Earn, which will allow them to receive airdropped tokens from several different mechanisms.
Understanding BNB
History of BNB
Binance coin came into existence in 2017 when it was sold through an initial coin offering (ICO). A total of 200 million units of this digital asset were created, and 100 million were sold via the ICO. Another 20 million units were allocated to angel investors and 80 million were issued to the founding team. Originally, binance coin was an ERC-20 token available on the Ethereum blockchain.
In April 2019, Binance released Binance Chain, its own custom blockchain. That same month, the exchange revealed that it would allow users to migrate their binance coin to the new blockchain, and that it would create BNB tokens as the Binance Coin tokens were eliminated.
The Transition To Binance Chain And Binance Smart Chain
Binance Chain first came into existence in 2019. It was later renamed BNB Beacon Chain. Originally, the primary objective of Binance Chain was to support a decentralized exchange (DEX) and allow that exchange to support a significant number of transactions.
However, Binance Chain lacked smart contract functionality, so BNB Smart Chain, which allowed developers to implement smart contracts, was released to exist alongside it. Since then, developers have deployed thousands of dapps on BNB smart chain (BSC). At the time of this writing, there were more than 2,000 of these decentralized software programs on this particular chain.
