Binance Burns $500M in Latest Quarterly BNB Burn Despite Recent $500M Cross-Chain Exploit

Content of article:

• Binance burns BNB to curb its circulation
• Binance burn impressive following BNB Chain exploit

Burn: Per its BNB Auto-Burn procedure, BINANCE burned 2,065,152.42 of BNB worth roughly $574 million despite losing out to a recent $570 million hack.

This latest burn takes the  BNB destroyed to 38,996,924.79, approximately $10,092,316,766.94 at BNB’s current price. BNB is the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Binance burns BNB to curb its circulation

The recent Binance burn  the exchange’s latest efforts to reduce the circulating supply of BNB to 100,000,000.

It continues a  started by the exchange in 2017 to use 20% of its profits to rebuy BNB in its treasury for quarterly burning. In 2021, it switched to a more objective auto-burn formula-based mechanism independent of Binance’s revenues generated using BNB.

The number of BNB burned now depends on BNB price and other secondary factors. These include supply and demand and supply and the number of transaction blocks generated in a quarter. BNB is a native token that powers the BNB Smart Chain, and it is used in the chain’s governance. 

Of the tokens burned, 4,833.25 (about $1M) BNB were burned through Binance’s Pioneer Burn Program. Binance announced this remedial mechanism in Sep. 2020 to help qualifying customers that may have lost BNB by sending them their lost tokens and burning the same amount in the next quarterly token burn

Binance burn impressive following BNB Chain exploit

The latest Binance burn is all the more impressive. Especially when considering that, less than a week ago, a cross-chain BNB bridge was hacked. It linked the BNB Smart Chain and the BNB Beacon Chain, resulting in the  of 200 million BNB. A cross-chain bridge is a software construct that allows cryptocurrency transfer from one blockchain to another. 

Apparently, hackers exploited a bug in the Token Hub bridge’s smart contract code that allowed them to forge transactions and move funds into their wallets.

interview with CNBC, Binance CEO Chanpeng “CZ” Zhao said to have reached out to core BNB developers to pause the blockchain. The initiative limited damages to under $100 million and even managed to freeze $ 7 million using its security partners.

About $400 million remains unaccounted for, with the hackers unable to move them off the BNB Smart Chain. On-chain governance methods will be used to decide whether the stolen funds will be frozen. Or if the remaining funds will be “covered” using the BNB auto-burn mechanism, the community in a blog post.

In response to the burn, Crypto/Forex trader Crypto Prince lauded Binance:

Another Twitter user, reaper, expressed similar sentiments:

CZ called on his followers to send burn memes shortly before the burn began:

The transaction ID for the 21st quarterly burn is: https://explorer.bnbchain.org/tx/5C6C88892AB98D820173DF6F784F76DDABCA32A06546C132514E663E66699794