Binance Chain Statistics

It was in early 2019, when Binance announced the creation of a native blockchain for their ecosystem. Their goal was to launch a platform that can handle very large loads and is perfectly suited to exchange assets. Today, Binance Chain has been live for nearly 1.5 years, with block 1 created in April 2019. It has witnessed rapid growth ever since with the onboarding of over 200 assets and 134 million transactions. In this article, I will present aggregated statistics on Binance chain transactions and assets.

Let’s look at the transaction growth first. In the second quarter of 2019, Binance Chain already had a total of 3.2 million transactions. This number went up significantly higher in Q3 2019, with a total of 20.7 million transactions. It also increased in Q4, when the total number of transactions rose by another 15% to a total of 23.7 million transactions. In 2020, transaction numbers stayed above the 20 million mark, with 27 million transaction in Q1, 26 million in Q2 and a high of 34 million transactions in Q3. As a comparison, the Ethereum network processed 103 million transactions in Q3 2020.

You might ask: How can a relatively new platform like Binance Chain with far less assets than Ethereum have a transaction number as high as 33% of Ethereum’s transactions in Q3 2020? Well, Binance Chain has a unique feature, which is on-chain orders. Every time an order is placed or canceled on Binance’s decentralized exchange, it is logged in a transaction on Binance’s blockchain. 96% of the transactions on Binance Chain were on-chain orders, which were either “place order” (56%) or “cancel order” (40%). Just around 4% of the total of 134.7 million transactions were “transfer” transactions.

Binance Coin is by far not the only asset on Binance Chain. Since its inception, an increasing number of assets have been issued on Binance Chain. From just 7 assets issued in April 2019, the mark of 100 assets issued was already broken in July 2019. Until the end of Q3 2020, there have been 222 assets issued on Binance Chain. However, some of them were burned completely afterwards and don’t appear in the explorer under the list of assets anymore. That’s possible due to Binance Chain’s native “burn” transaction type, which has already been used 146 times by different coins and tokens. Talking about listings on Binance DEX, this number expectedly correlates with the number of issued assets, even though it shows, that not all issued assets were listed on the DEX.

Let’s take a closer look at the assets on Binance Chain. To measure the adoption of an asset on Binance Chain, I like to consider the amount of holders of at least 100 BNB worth of this particular asset. It is a better approach than to consider the total amount of holders, since it ignores addresses with small amounts of a token. Also, assets on Binance chain are mostly traded against BNB, so measuring the value of holders in BNB makes more sense than measuring it in USD. At the end of Q3 2020, RUNE had the most addresses with a balance of above 100 BNB on Binance Chain with 1,315 addresses, while FTM was ranked second with 1,228 addresses. They were also the only tokens with more than 1,000 addresses above a 100 BNB balance. The third spot went to AVA with 319 addresses, while SHR was placed fourth with 268 addresses. The ranks 5 to 9 belonged to AWC, TWT, MTXLT, CRPT and RAVEN and were relatively close with around 200 addresses.

However, to not only measure adoption of assets but also usage of the chain, I analyzed the assets that caused the most transactions on Binance Chain as well. Please note that this list excludes the “cancel order” transaction type, since the explorer doesn’t attribute this transaction type to particular assets. With 9.3 million transactions and therefore accountable for 11% of all transactions on Binance Chain, BUSD has the number one spot in this category. It is followed by DEFI (6.12M transactions), AVA (5.81M), UND (3.46M), USDSB (3.12M), BTCB (2.52M) and IDRTB (2.47M). The other assets on Binance Chain combine for 61.2% of all transactions. Interesting side note: The top assets by transaction type differ mostly from the top assets by addresses with a balance over 100 BNB per asset.

As the native token of the chain, BNB is excluded from the list of transactions by asset, since it is involved in every transaction. I also had to exclude it from the list of addresses with a balance of over 100 BNB for a particular asset, since the Binance Chain Explorer doesn’t display more than 1,500 addresses in a rich list per asset. The 1,500th richest address on Binance Chain in terms of BNB currently holds 249 BNB.

This article discussed several statistics of Binance Chain. Since its launch in Q2 2019, Binance Chain has executed around 135 million transactions. 96% of those transactions are on-chain orders on Binance DEX, 4% are transfers of assets. Ever since the launch, the number of assets issued on Binance Chain increased to 222. 14 of those assets have over 100 addresses holding 100 BNB worth of that asset, while 13 assets combine for 50% of all transactions on Binance Chain. All in all, Binance Chain has been successfully onboarding assets and users from 2019 onwards and it will be exciting to watch its further growth in the coming years.