BNB ranks #3 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #4: 1 of the 3 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 1 non-native asset CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 1 is a claim on another asset.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | B · 66/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #3 |
| Rank counting claims | #4 |
| Market capitalisation | $99.2B |
| Price | $754.17 |
| Circulating supply | 131,511,545 BNB |
| Maximum supply | 200,000,000 BNB |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | PoSA (exchange chain) |
| Network purpose | Exchange chain |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Contested |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
B — 66 out of 100, provisional (from 16 of 17 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 62 to 68 (C to B).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 9.1 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards | 6.3 | group average, 5 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 4 | 4 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✗ | PoSA (exchange chain) |
| Limited supply | ✓ | fixed maximum of 200,000,000 |
| No pre-issuance or developer mint | ✗ | |
| No developer tax | ✓ | |
| No authority that can halt the chain or freeze funds | ✗ | Validators halted the chain on 6 Oct 2022 after the Token Hub bridge exploit and shipped a release that blacklisted the attacker's addresses. |
| No central team | ✗ | BNB Chain (Binance-backed) maintains the reference geth fork bnb-chain/bsc and its new reth-bsc client, and sets the roadmap through BEPs. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.0008 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | BEP-126 fast finality makes blocks final about two blocks after inclusion, around a second at the current 0.45 s block time. |
| UTXO ledger | ✗ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 7.5 | average of 4 measures source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0008 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 10 | about 7,400 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.45 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 1.75 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 2330 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 6 | 6 of 9 passed source |
| Miners paid over $1 million a day | ✗ | not mined |
| Miners paid over $100,000 a day | ✗ | |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✗ | not mined |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 7.5% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 22.5% |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 3 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | BNB Chain (Binance-backed) maintains the reference geth fork bnb-chain/bsc and its new reth-bsc client, and sets the roadmap through BEPs. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 15,500,000 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation: who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Decentralisation: nodes (Source) | 5.5 | 45 active validators or block producers (source: Figment) |
| Decentralisation: holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Capabilities (protocol features) | 1.7 | 1 of 6 passed source |
| Decentralisation | ||
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | bsc (geth fork) relays transactions directly; no Dandelion or built-in Tor. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No in-protocol light client for BNB Smart Chain; wallets rely on RPC servers. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | bsc node: --history.blocks (formerly --pruneancient) drops old block data, alongside state pruning. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No native payment channels or protocol-enforced instant payments. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions in the protocol. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No protocol-level sender or receiver hiding. |
| Issuance | 3.3 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. All 200M BNB were created by Binance at launch in July 2017 (whitepaper split 50% ICO, 40% founding team, 10% angel investors) and no BNB has ever been mined or minted openly; current supply after quarterly burns is ~131.5M (CoinGecko total = circulating, 2026-10-23; 133.17M after the 36th burn in July 2026), all of it from that genesis issue. source |
| Fundraising | 0 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 100% of supply was theirs to sell, 31% sold so far. Binance claimed 100M BNB sold in the July 2017 ICO plus 20M to paying angels, but Forbes' on-chain forensics found only 10.78M BNB delivered to ICO buyers and 40M to angels (20M per the whitepaper plus a further 20M of unclear consideration), so sold = 30.78M-50.78M. Midpoint 40.78M / 131,511,776 BNB (CoinGecko total, 2026-10-24) = 31.0% (range 23.4-38.6%; Binance's own 120M claim would give 91%). Whitepaper: 100M BNB for a July 2017 ICO (target ~$15M) and 20M (10%) for angel investors who bought before the ICO. A Forbes investigation (reported by CryptoSlate) found ICO buyers actually received ~10.78M BNB (~$5M raised) and angels ~40M. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. BNB has no block reward or inflation: all 200M were created by Binance in 2017, BNB Smart Chain validators earn only transaction fees, and supply only falls through quarterly auto-burns and the BEP-95 fee burn. Nothing is issued, so nothing can be cut. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.8 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 7.6 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 46 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 9.2 | $221,201,744 traded in 24 hours; #17 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $168,387,572) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 2.3 | 0.17% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 4.8 | $27,724,169 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.03% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 3 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 10 | $99B, at the top of the scale |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 9 | perpetual open interest 1.0% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 7.9 | fixed maximum supply of 200 million |
| Record | 9.3 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 1 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| Negative record | ||
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2022-10-06 | ✗ | BNB Smart Chain halted by coordinated validators after the BSC Token Hub bridge exploit minted 2M BNB; restarted hours later with a release disabling cross-chain transfers and blacklisting the attacker address. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 9 | 9 full years since 2017-07-14, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 10 | 5 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 535 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/bnb-chain/bsc); bnb-chain/bsc v1.8.1, 2026-10-16; 31 stable releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | BSC v1.6.6, 2026: ported critical go-ethereum 1.16.8 fixes for two P2P vulnerabilities. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Lorentz (Apr 2025) cut blocks to 1.5 s, Maxwell (Jun 2025) to 0.75 s, Fermi (14 Jan 2026) to 0.45 s; minimum gas price lowered to 0.05 gwei in 2025. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Pascal hard fork, Mar 2025: EIP-7702 smart-account transactions on BSC. |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | BEP-20 (ERC-20 compatible) contracts on BNB Smart Chain's EVM, open to any account. |
Seventeen criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards group four parts: properties (ten checks drawn from the Bitcoin whitepaper), scalability (four measures), security (nine checks) and decentralisation (three scales). Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
131,511,545 of a maximum 200,000,000 BNB are in circulation — 65.8% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 31% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Nodes or validators | 45 |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
All 200M BNB were created by Binance at launch in July 2017 (whitepaper split 50% ICO, 40% founding team, 10% angel investors) and no BNB has ever been mined or minted openly; current supply after quarterly burns is ~131.5M (CoinGecko total = circulating, 2026-10-23; 133.17M after the 36th burn in July 2026), all of it from that genesis issue.
Whitepaper: 100M BNB for a July 2017 ICO (target ~$15M) and 20M (10%) for angel investors who bought before the ICO. A Forbes investigation (reported by CryptoSlate) found ICO buyers actually received ~10.78M BNB (~$5M raised) and angels ~40M.
Binance claimed 100M BNB sold in the July 2017 ICO plus 20M to paying angels, but Forbes' on-chain forensics found only 10.78M BNB delivered to ICO buyers and 40M to angels (20M per the whitepaper plus a further 20M of unclear consideration), so sold = 30.78M-50.78M. Midpoint 40.78M / 131,511,776 BNB (CoinGecko total, 2026-10-24) = 31.0% (range 23.4-38.6%; Binance's own 120M claim would give 91%).
BNB has no block reward or inflation: all 200M were created by Binance in 2017, BNB Smart Chain validators earn only transaction fees, and supply only falls through quarterly auto-burns and the BEP-95 fee burn. Nothing is issued, so nothing can be cut.
Sources: forbes.es · forkast.news · forklog.com · coingecko.com · github.com · bnbburn.info. Researched 2026-10-24, low confidence.
Alleged an unregistered security by the SEC (2023 complaint); not named a commodity in 2026 and not adjudicated — status unsettled.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
BNB is #3 among cryptocurrencies and #4 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The one place between BNB's two ranks is held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).
See the 3 wrapped and staked claims on BNB →