Ever since its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in July of 2017 which saw the sale of 100 million tokens being sold, the Binance Token (BNB) has been on a very interesting upward trajectory and is currently the 7th largest cryptocurrency in the market, according to market cap rankings.
Currently priced at $23.95 with a market cap of $3.40 billion, BNB has been an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. However, this is already almost completely changed as Binance has now announced its own custom Binance chain and a complete swap from ERC20 Ethereum-based tokens, by the 23rd of April.
Launch and Mainnet Swap
In December of 2018, the official Binance Twitter account made public the firm’s plans to create its own blockchain with the aim of helping adoption and also letting other platforms use it to issue tokens. According to the tweet:
“#Binance is pushing for blockchain adoption and doing many things to help advancement of the industry. E.g. we will have the Binance chain ready in the coming months, on which millions of projects can easily issue tokens”.
Now, according to the announcement made on the official Binance Community website, the Binance Chain mainnet has been launched and the Swap will occur in a few days. The post explained that blocks will be produced “with consensus from the genesis block” and that “Binance Coin (BNB), will be created in the genesis block.”
Furthermore, the initial amount of BNB that would be available is expected to be 200,000,000 and the token would be converted from ERC20 BNB to BEP2 BNB which is the native for the Binance Chain. However, users who want their BNB tokens to stay ERC20-based are advised to withdraw them into an Ethereum Wallet immediately.
“If users still want to keep the ERC20 based BNB tokens for any reason during the conversion period, then they may withdraw their BNB from Binance.com accounts into an Ethereum Wallet BEFORE 2 AM (UTC), April 23rd. Please note that withdrawn ERC20 BNB tokens will only have temporary usage, as all BNB tokens will be migrated to Binance Chain. After April 23rd, Binance.com will NOT support the withdrawal of ERC20 BNB tokens.”
Possible All-Time High
After this announcement, the BNB token increased more than 11% and is quite close to reaching a new all-time high if the current trajectory doesn’t break. It’s important to note that the token, since January this year, has risen over 200%.
Reactions
Reactions towards Binance and its movements are quite exciting as this can be seen in its market price, position and increase. The entire progress and swap, when eventually completed, is still expected to push the coin a lot higher as it would seem that many people have a lot of faith in the coin.
Joseph Young, a cryptoanalyst, investor and writer tweeted that:
BNB is the only crypto to hit its all time high today.
The next in line are down 23 percent from ATH. Quite incredible https://t.co/WiAQqZIfP1
— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) April 19, 2019
Hopefully, the Binance chain would hold the coin more effectively than the Ethereum blockchain.
