BNB

The 2017 Binance whitepaper, as quoted in the SEC complaint, set out 200 million ERC-20 BNB: 100 million for the public ICO, 80 million for the founding team and 20 million for angel investors. The first use was immediate—pay Binance trading fees and receive a discount under the exchange’s rules.

That arrangement joined token demand to a company product. Binance could revise a fee program without changing Ethereum, so BNB’s early utility depended on both a public ledger and private exchange policy.

BNB migrated from Ethereum to Binance Chain in April 2019. The new chain gave BNB a native role and prioritized a fast onchain order book, but it did not provide the general smart-contract environment developers wanted.

Binance Smart Chain launched beside it on 1 September 2020 with EVM execution, BNB transaction fees and staking. The 2022 BNB Chain name grouped the two networks; it was a rebrand, not another token swap.

On 6–7 October 2022, an attacker forged low-level proofs in BSC Token Hub and withdrew 2 million newly created BNB. The bug sat in the native bridge between Beacon Chain and BSC rather than in an ordinary wallet transfer.

BNB Chain reported 26 active validators and 44 in total. Its team said it contacted community validators one by one, after which validators coordinated the BSC suspension and an upgrade. The response restricted further movement, but it also demonstrated that the network could be interrupted through rapid offchain coordination.

Staking, governance and asset functions moved into BSC, and Beacon Chain stopped at block 385,251,927 on 3 December 2024. Closing the older chain also removed the Token Hub route that had failed in 2022.

Supply reduction followed a separate transition. Auto-Burn replaced exchange-activity-based quarterly burns with a price-and-block formula, while BEP-95 destroys part of block gas fees. At 10:35 UTC on 15 July 2026, the 36th burn notice reported 1,615,827.795 BNB destroyed and total supply of 133,166,127.91.

On 21 November 2023, CZ pleaded guilty to causing Binance to violate the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. Binance separately pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act, unlicensed money-transmission and sanctions violations and agreed to a $4.3 billion resolution. Those pleas concerned the exchange and its compliance conduct.

The SEC’s civil complaint separately alleged an unregistered BNB offering. On 29 May 2025 the parties jointly dismissed the action with prejudice as an exercise of SEC policy discretion. The dismissal ended that case but did not decide on the merits whether BNB was or was not a security. These outcomes belonged to the company and enforcement layer: they neither upgraded BNB consensus nor recorded a validator vote.