BNB Chain Destroys 1.64 Million BNB in Its 37th Quarterly Burn

BNB Chain destroyed 1,646,196.44 BNB on Monday morning, in what the BNB Foundation called the 37th quarterly burn of the token. The transaction was recorded at 10:05 UTC and sent the coins to an address nobody holds the keys to. Total supply fell to 131,512,085 BNB, which leaves the chain about 31.51 million tokens above the 100 million it has said it wants to reach. What the burn was worth is where the accounts part company.

Two prices for one burn

PANews and ChainCatcher both put the value at $1,197,344,519.40 at the moment of the burn, to the cent, and crypto.news rounds the same figure to about $1.197 billion. The Cryptonomist, filing within the hour, called it "about $1 billion at the reference price". Those do not reconcile, and nothing in the four accounts explains the roughly $197 million between them. None of them states the price it used. The token count is not in dispute: three of the four give 1,646,196.44 BNB and the fourth rounds to 1.646 million.

"The 37th quarterly $BNB token burn has been completed directly on BNB Smart Chain (BSC)," the BNB Chain post said.

What the quarter actually removed

July's burn, the 36th, took 1,615,827.795 BNB out at about $931.7 million and left supply at 133,166,127.91. Set the two supply figures beside each other and the quarter removed 1,654,042.91 tokens, roughly 7,850 more than the quarterly burn itself destroyed. No account checked reconciles the remainder. The Cryptonomist notes that BEP-95, a separate rule, burns a share of gas fees in real time as blocks are produced, which is the mechanism in that area. It does not tie that rule to this gap, and neither does anyone else.

How the number gets set

The quarterly figure is not chosen by hand. The Cryptonomist describes the auto-burn calculation as running on BNB's price together with the count of BNB Smart Chain blocks produced over the quarter, though no outlet in this sweep publishes the formula and that description rests on one account. Set the dollar value against the token count and the implied reference price works out near $576.61 in July against about $727.34 in October, by crypto.news's own arithmetic. By count, October's burn was 30,368.645 BNB bigger, about 1.88%. By value it was about $265.6 million bigger, roughly 28.5%. The distance between those two percentages is the price doing the work.

The price did not move much

BNB traded around $725.45 at crypto.news's press time, up about half a percent on the day and about 3.3% lower over the week, on a market capitalisation near $95.42 billion that put it fourth by that measure. The same page's ticker reads $95,277,636,695 and a 0.18% daily gain, so the figures on a single page disagree with each other; the body numbers are the ones used here. Technical readings on that page have the token under its 20-day average of $751.70, with support in the low $700s. Quarterly burns run on a published schedule, so the date was known in advance. Programmes that buy a token back before destroying it work on the same logic, as Jito did when it routed all of its DAO's exchange revenue into open-market purchases of its own token.

Two questions are left sitting. The value of Monday's burn is reported two ways and no outlet shows its reference price, and the 7,850 BNB that left supply outside the burn itself goes unaccounted for in every account checked. Neither input to the next quarterly figure is fixed: the price moves daily, and the block count depends on how busy the chain is between now and the 38th burn.