Binance Coin (BNB) Spiked 66% Since The Latest Market Crash, Here Is Why

Binance and its answer to Ethereum, dubbed Binance Coin (BNB), managed to quickly become among the best options for new and upcoming projects, raising its market capitalization to nearly $50 billion in just a couple of years.

The latest crypto havoc in mid-June has imposed great stress on all cryptos, but some – like Binance’s BNB, survived the crash with a more pleasant result. Data from CryptoBrowser shows that the fifth-largest crypto project to date fell to a 52-week low of $184.54 per BNB, a little over a year from its peak of $690.93 per BNB.

The devastating 73% correction that began in November 2021, however, didn’t seem to affect the entire crypto market the same way, as BNB has outperformed the broader altcoin market in terms of capitalization.

BNB’s road to recovery

Interestingly, Binance Coin is now trading at the same price point as it was trading a little over a year ago. When comparing historical data from July 2021 and August 2022, the altcoin market capitalization was 21% higher last year, sitting at around $740 billion. And despite Bitcoin and Ethereum dominating the scene, the race for the #3 crypto between Tether, BNB, and Cardano was close with Binance and Cardano separated by less than $1 billion in market capitalization.

Fast forward to the present day, where BNB dropped two positions to #5, but remained relatively stable in its market cap, even increasing to over $48 billion. However, Cardano, Ripple, and the rest of the fleet of altcoins took a beating, and now Binance’s native stablecoin – Binance USD secured a market cap of $19.2 billion, which is almost $2 billion larger than Ripple, while Cardano struggles to keep its market capitalization above $16 billion.

The best trick up Binance’s sleeve was the smart contract functionality of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), which allowed many projects to either switch from the gas fee havoc on Ethereum or launch their decentralized apps directly on the new blockchain.

With the DeFi craze and the following Web3 and NFT surge, Binance had all the tools needed to become a real competitor to Ethereum, with PancakeSwap, which runs on BSC, currently having 1.98 million active addresses. In contrast, Ethereum currently has a total of three running dApps - Uniswap, OpeanSea, and MetaMask Swap, which are above 30,000 active addresses.

BNB chasing TRON to become the second-largest blockchain in TVL

The Total Value Locked (TVL) metric usually shows how much a given blockchain's users have deposited into the network, with some experts believing that this is by far one of the most important metrics for blockchain success. Indeed, Ethereum is the dominant blockchain in terms of TVL with almost $36 billion locked. However, Binance Smart Chain is catching up to Ethereum’s runner-up – TRON, as the two networks are just $500 million apart. The $5.5 billion TVL value of BSC is actually more than the value of Avalanche (AVAX) and Polygon (MATIC) combined.

Binance is the leading crypto exchange

Maybe the best factor of Binance’s native coin success is the fact that the exchange is the largest in the world. Data from SimilarWeb reveals that Binance had 300 million website visitors in the past 30 days versus 121 million from Coinbase, which is also a publicly-listed company in the United States.

Furthermore, Binance is the weapon of choice for many specialized dApps, as the BEP-20 token standard is more flexible and easy to swap, when comparing it to Ethereum, for example.