Crypto exchange Binance on Friday has announced that it burned 808,888 Binance Coins (BNB) worth around $24 million.
It was the eighth quarterly burn of the native tokens of the crypto exchange and a part of its commitment to burn 100 million BNB tokens.
As mentioned in BNB Whitepaper , the team at the exchange was allocated 80 million BNB - 40 percent of the tokens in circulation - all of which will be eventually burned.
“With this change, we'll still burn BNB based on trading volume on Binance per quarter. But this time, the Binance team has given up our token allocation,” Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of the exchange, stated.
“We are now committing to building the Binance ecosystem without getting any BNB from the initial allocation. The team will burn their own tokens first. All US$2,400,000,000 of it!”
Per the announcement, the exchange will eventually keep only 100 million BNB in circulation. Currently, 189 million BNB are in supply, including the ones held by Binance team. This means the exchange needs to burn 89 million more tokens to achieve its goal.
It also detailed that the team will burn its holding of 80 million BNB first, followed by the destruction of the remaining nine million BNB by the exchange.
“To recap, this is equivalent to the Binance team allocating 0 BNB to ourselves from the original supply. All BNB we have are either earned through our services or bought with our own money,” Zhao continued.
One of the most profitable tokens
In 2017, Binance raised $15 million by selling its native token to cover its operational costs. The token’s value, however, skyrocketed in the months after, as the exchange offered discounts for trading with BNB tokens. Today, BNB is the seventh largest token in the market with a total market cap of $4.4 billion, as seen on Coinmarketcap.com.
Meanwhile, Bitfinex recently repurchased LEO tokens with 27 percent of the revenue generated from its Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) ) platform for the purpose of burning.
