Thanks to Binance Coin's massive price increase, you'd be sitting on a fortune.

Shortly after it launched in 2017, the Binance exchange created its own cryptocurrency called Binance Coin (BNB). At that time, Binance was a newcomer compared to other exchanges and its signature crypto was dirt cheap.

Things have changed quite a bit since then. Binance is now the world's largest crypto exchange, dwarfing the competition in terms of trading volume and weekly site visits. Binance Coin has climbed the charts and is the fourth-biggest crypto by market cap at the time of this writing.

Let's find out what a timely Binance Coin investment would be worth now, along with what the coin does and its current outlook.

The growth of Binance Coin

Binance Coin started with an initial coin offering (ICO) where it could be purchased using Bitcoin or Ethereum. Its earliest recorded cash price on CoinMarketCap comes on July 25, 2017, when it was available for as little as $0.10. If you had bought $1,000 worth, you would have gotten 10,000 BNB.

The current price of Binance Coin is $290.57. Your investment would now be worth over $2.9 million.

That's a jaw dropping number, and it's not even the best you could've done. When Binance Coin hit its all-time high of $690.93 on May 10, 2021, 10,000 BNB were worth nearly $7 million.

How Binance Coin is used

Binance Coin is the native cryptocurrency for Binance. You can buy it, sell it, and trade it for other cryptocurrencies. Those are things you can do with just about any crypto, but what makes Binance Coin special is the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

Here's how BSC works:

• It's a programmable blockchain that developers can use to build their own projects.

• It's able to run smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts created using code.

• One of its main uses is decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. These applications, which have rapidly grown in popularity, aim to offer an alternative to traditional financial products. For example, there are DeFi platforms for borrowing and lending crypto.

• It's compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, making it easy to bring over projects built on Ethereum.

• Transaction fees, which are called gas fees, are paid in Binance Coin.

That final point is why the success of BSC ties in to the success of Binance Coin. If you use apps built on BSC, you need Binance Coin to pay the gas fees. The more people who use those apps, the more demand there will be for Binance Coin.

Since BSC only launched in September 2020, it's much newer than Ethereum, its biggest competitor. However, it has been gaining on Ethereum because it offers faster and cheaper transactions.

Gas fees are much higher on Ethereum than they are on BSC, and transactions take much longer. Ethereum is rolling out upgrades to a new version, Ethereum 2.0, that should solve both problems. But for now, BSC is more efficient. That bodes well for both Binance and Binance Coin.

Is Binance Coin a smart investment?

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