A forensic analysis by Gray Wolf Analytics and Forbes reveals that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) owns many BNB tokens, which has significantly increased his wealth. Accordingly, CZ controls a large portion of the circulating supply of BNB tokens. Amid this news, metrics show that BNB’s social dominance is declining.
Binance founder’s wealth and BNB control
BNB is the native token of crypto exchange Binance and provides holders with trading fee discounts on the platform. The maximum supply of the digital asset is limited to 200 million tokens. Moreover, more than 147 million BNB tokens are currently in circulation. Notably, the price of BNB has more than doubled since the beginning of the year. In the process, the token recently recorded a new ATH of $720.
Zhao has never publicly disclosed his BNB holdings. However, a 2017 whitepaper from BNB’s initial coin offering (ICO) allocated 80 million tokens to the founding team. Analysis shows that Binance holds 46.2 million of those tokens. We know that Zhao owns 90% of Binance. This means that his stake is about 41.6 million tokens.
Further analysis shows that Changpeng Zhao increased his BNB holdings in additional ways. According to Forbes, only 10.8 million BNB were sold in Binance’s ICO instead of the 100 million requested. The unsold tokens, around 58 million BNB, were allegedly transferred to Zhao’s wallets. Therefore, based on 90% ownership, CZ controls around 52 million of these tokens. Thus, the Binance founder’s total holdings from the first team reward and unsold tokens amounted to about 94 million BNB. As a result, Forbes concludes that Zhao’s significant holdings make him the 24th richest person worldwide with an estimated net worth of $61 billion.
What’s the next target for BNB?
Crypto analyst Victor Olanrewaju takes a look at BNB’s metrics. From there, he shares his price predictions. At the time of writing, the altcoin’s social dominance has dropped to 0.617. This metric tracks the interest in a cryptocurrency based on social media and crypto media discussions. Therefore, the drop implies that the community’s interest and engagement in BNB has dropped overall. Therefore, it is difficult for the cryptocurrency to see improved demand that would herald higher prices.
Also, Open Interest (OI) fell to $473.46 million at press time. OI is the value of the sum of all existing contracts on a cryptocurrency in the market. An increase in value means that there is an increase in speculative activity around the coin. In most cases, this serves as a force for bullishness. On the contrary, a decrease in BNB’s speculative positions means that it may be difficult for the price to bounce. In its current form, a decline is likely for BNB. Therefore, BNB is likely to break below key support levels. However, a change in the trend is possible if buying pressure increases.
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