First published 28 April 2020, when BNB was the exchange token and the Beacon Chain was the chain. Expanded in October 2026 for BNB Smart Chain and the Beacon Chain sunset. BNB is two products that share a ticker. One is a token a company, Binance, sold in 2017 so customers could pay trading fees at a discount and join promotions. That use lives on Binance’s own books. The other is the native coin of BNB Smart Chain, the public ledger where BNB pays for computation the way ether pays for computation on Ethereum. An app can show both as “BNB” and still be talking about a balance you cannot withdraw, a token on Ethereum, or a coin on BNB Smart Chain. Those are different cities.
The company and the chain are related on purpose. They are not the same object. Binance pleaded guilty. BNB’s chain did not is the 2023 company case. This page is the asset and the networks it has lived on.
Where it came from
The 2017 sale was an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. One hundred million of a 200 million supply were sold to the public in that design; the rest was allocated to the company, the team, and incentives. The white paper’s burn plan said half the supply, 100 million BNB, would be destroyed over time. Burns have happened, on a schedule the project runs and, separately, inside each block. The chain has not published a law that the price must rise because a burn happened. A burn reduces a number. Markets decide what the remaining number is worth.
In 2019 Binance launched its own chain, then called Binance Chain. BNB moved there as a BEP-2 token. Addresses on that chain look like bnb1…. In 2020 it added Binance Smart Chain, an Ethereum-style machine, later renamed BNB Smart Chain. Tokens there are BEP-20. Addresses look like Ethereum addresses, 0x and forty hex characters. Same shape, different notebook.
The Beacon Chain stopped
On 19 November 2024 the BNB Beacon Chain, the renamed Binance Chain, halted at a planned sunset. It no longer takes transactions. BEP-2 and BEP-8 assets that were still there needed a migration onto BNB Smart Chain if they had a path across, and the project published a recovery tool for some of them after the halt. Assets with no cross-chain path were stranded. A deposit screen that still offers a bnb1 address is offering a chain that has stopped. Do not send to it because an old withdrawal once worked.
The live chain for ordinary use is BNB Smart Chain. Gas is BNB. A token on that chain is not BNB, just as a token on Ethereum is not ETH. opBNB is a further network in the same brand, a layer 2. Bridging onto it is extra software, not a tunnel. The wrong network is still the wrong city, and here the wrong network wears the same logo.
Who produces blocks
BNB Smart Chain uses proof of staked authority. Holders stake BNB to validators. The chain’s own description is a daily election: the top staked validators, a set of 45, are active, and a smaller rotating group of 21 produces blocks in each epoch. Miss your turn and the stake can be slashed. This is not Bitcoin mining, and it is not Ethereum’s open queue of 32 ETH validators. A few dozen elected operators is a smaller set of people who can stall or censor than a chain that anyone with hardware can extend. That is a design trade for faster blocks and lower fees. Name it as a trade. Do not call it “just like Bitcoin, but on Binance.”
BEP-95 burns a share of each block’s gas. The share started at 10 percent and is a parameter validators can change. The project also runs a separate scheduled burn toward the old 100 million target. Neither burn is a coupon. The supply you can check is the supply on the chain today, not the white paper’s destination.
The exchange use is still a company rule
Fee discounts, launchpad allocations, and VIP tiers are Binance products. They apply to a Binance account, under Binance’s terms, in the countries where Binance offers them. They do not travel with BNB that you withdrew to a wallet, except where the company says a holding elsewhere still counts. Read the terms. An exchange balance is an IOU, not a wallet. Withdrawing BNB to a wallet you control leaves the discount schedule behind and puts you on a chain, with keys, fees, and a network choice.
What to check
Which network the sender named: BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum, or opBNB. Whether the address is 0x or the retired bnb1 form. Whether you are sending native BNB or a BEP-20 token that happens to sit next to it. A test amount. The chain will not phone Binance support because you picked Ethereum for a Smart Chain deposit, and Binance support cannot unstick a Beacon Chain deposit the sunset already closed.
Nothing here is an instruction to buy BNB, to stake it, or to use Binance. The token is a company instrument that grew a chain. Keep those two sentences in the same head.
