I write about digital assets trends and am a leading creator of the Forbes Digital Assets tools and functionality our viewers require. I support the generation of relevant, curated investor content using a variety of digital assets data. Apart from my responsibilities as Director of Data and Analytics, I write about crypto exchanges, top digital assets, crypto funds, and active trading. I've the good (or suspect) fortune of having a Wall Street analyst background, and have written on topics related to wealth management, retail brokerage, and digital assets. I'm also a McGraw-Hill author.
CEO Changpeng Zhao portrayed Binance's initial coin offering of its BNB token as a"huge" success. Blockchain data point to an alternate interpretation.The mythology surrounding the rise of the world’s largest crypto exchange is impressive. However, a Forbes investigation reveals that Binance’s 2017 initial coin offering was a flop, that it quietly took advantage of to amass a lucrative crypto warchest.
It was an auspicious time to be entering the nascent market for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s price had quadrupled over the preceding year to nearly $2,800, and video gamers-turned-entrepreneurs were getting rich floating dubious ideas in white papers as hundreds of digital currencies were launched in initial coin offerings, or ICOs. In the first six months of 2017, the cryptocurrency market swelled fivefold to more than $100 billion.
Zhao’s rosy proclamations about his ICO’s success were well received. Those tokens, which initially traded for 15 cents each, now sell for $213, but they soared as high as $675 in 2021. Today BNB coin is the fourth-most-valuable digital asset in the world, worth $33 billion. Founder Zhao is worthby Forbes’ reckoning, however our calculation reflects the value of his business interests and does not include the massive amount of BNB he presumably controls.
Few knew about BNB’s initial misfire, in part because crypto ICOs are unregulated, and there are no SEC filings with disclosures of any kind. But there appears to have been a silver lining to Binance’s ICO troubles. The exchange’s founders, including Zhao, were left with 145 million of its minted BNB tokens by September 2018, instead of the 80 million initially planned.
Below you will find details of Forbes analysis of BNB’s initial coin offering and the movement of the token between wallets in the years following its ICO.ICOs were popular between 2017-2018, when hundreds of projects–including a good deal of scams–raised billions of dollars from investors by selling tokens minted out of thin air.
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