BNB is a crypto asset issued by Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms. It was created in 2017 as fuel for the Binance platform to reduce transaction and listing fees on the exchange and can also be used to buy goods and services from merchants that accept BNB.
From May 2017 to October 2019, BNB also functioned as an ERC20 token on Ethereum. In February 2019 it turned into a native coin with its own blockchain — Binance Chain (BC). The public blockchain utilizes the Tendermint consensus protocol.
The total supply of BNB is capped at 200 million tokens. 100 million BNB were distributed during the ICO, and 80 million each are allocated to the team and investors. The circulating supply is currently around 165 million as some tokens have been “burned” — taken out of circulation — in a process that will continue until 50% of the max supply (100 million) has been destroyed.