Binance Slashes BNB Supply by $916M—Price Reaction Ahead?

• ​BNB Chain has burned 1.579 million BNB tokens worth $916 million under its quarterly burn program to manage the token supply within its ecosystem.
• BNB Chain will continue to burn tokens quarterly until the supply is at 100 million, leaving 40.88 million tokens to be burned.

Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on X that BNB Chain, the blockchain network backed by Binance, has completed its 31st quarterly token burn. The burn involved 1,579,207.72 BNB tokens worth around $916 million. The tokens were sent to the infamous “blackhole” address, “0x00…00dEaD”, rendering them unusable.

Another milestone has been added to BNB’s deflationary journey. Regardless of the size of the burn, BNB’s market value had a minimal response, falling only 2.11% in the past 24 hours and trading at approximately $583, just 26% below its all-time high of $793.

At the same period, its market cap declined by 2.42% as the trading volume increased slightly by 3.21%. Circulating supply for BNB is still 140.89 million, while open interest decreased by 1.38% to $717.34 million. The muted response indicates that while token burns seek to create scarcity and drive value, sentiment in the market and investor activity are more powerful impetuses for short-term price action.

For context, BNB has two main mechanisms by which it reduces its future total token supply. The first is done through auto-burning, which is done quarterly and is an open and predictable process through a formula based on BNB’s market price and the amount of blocks mined on the BNB Smart Chain in the quarter. The mechanism operates irrespective of the trading volume or income of Binance.

The second is the real-time burning system brought in through BEP-95. Here, some of the gas fees paid in BNB are automatically burned with each transaction on the BNB Smart Chain. Like Ethereum’s EIP-1559, this mechanism is designed to make the network increasingly deflationary as it gains adoption. BNB’s long-term plan is to reduce its total supply from 200 million to 100 million tokens, with approximately 40.88 million BNB still to be burned.

Bullish Network Upgrades

Although the short-term market response was subdued, experts envision a rosy future for BNB. The gradual supply reduction, coupled with smart technical reforms to the BNB ecosystem, positions the token for long-term appreciation potential. 

One of them is the recent Lorentz hard fork upgrade, which reduced the block time of BNB Chain to 1.5 seconds. As featured in our recent coverage, the upgrade is intended to provide a faster and more responsive experience for users, developers, and validators. On the testnet opBNB, block time has already been reduced even more to 0.5 seconds. Additionally, the opBNB mainnet is going live on April 21, while the BSC (BNB Smart Chain) mainnet upgrade is on April 29. Finally,  BNB Chain has planned a June upgrade, called Maxwell, to improve performance by reducing block time to 0.75 seconds.