BNB

As of May 2022, BNB’s all-time highest price was $686.31, recorded on May 10, 2021, according to CoinGecko. The rally was likely to do with the surging popularity of decentralized applications (dapps), including decentralized finance (DeFi), on the Binance Smart Chain.Binance Smart Chain (later rebranded BNB Chain) is a layer 1 network, meaning other applications can be built on top of it. That makes it a competitor to the Ethereum network. It offers faster transactions and cheaper transaction speeds than Ethereum, but it is more centralized.The success of the BNB Chain contributes to rallies in the price of BNB because the token is needed to pay transaction fees on the chain. Anyone wanting to do business on the chain needs BNB tokens. In addition to its core centralized exchange, Binance has also built a decentralized exchange on the BNB Chain.BNB spent much of 2021-22 as the third or fourth largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization. As of May 2022, it is the fourth largest after bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH) and tether (USDT).Binance originally created the tokens in order to raise capital through an initial coin offering (ICO). The coins were sold in the first week of the ICO in July 2017 at a price of 2,700 BNB for 1 ETH. The offering included 100 million BNB, meaning at the top end it could have raised around 37,000 ETH, which would have been worth nearly $10 million at the time.The founding team and angel investors held another 100 million BNB between them. Binance proposed in its original whitepaper to spend 20% of its profits every quarter buying and removing BNB from circulation, until the volume was brought down to 100 million. As of May 2022, the volume in circulation is around 168 million BNB, according to CoinGecko.The process of removing tokens from circulation or “burning” tends to support the price of a token, all else being equal.BNB tokens are burned in “real time,” meaning all the time. A certain portion of transaction fees is burned whenever a block is validated. At the time of writing, the total burned in this way was just over 76,600 BNB. However, most BNB burning is done on a regular quarterly basis, with the amount calculated according to a formula based on the BNB price and the total number of blocks so far validated in the chain. In the first quarterly burn of 2022, more than 1.8 million BNB were burned.