Binance has not disclosed the details of their earnings this year, but The Block was able to deduce what the company earned by factoring the burn rate of the Binance BNB token. The Block’s analysis determined that the company brought in roughly $446 million.
Lary Cermak of The Block explains:
From its ICO offering in 2017, Binance raised $15 million for 100 million Binance Coin (BNB) out of 200 million in total supply. As part of maintaining its coin, Binance uses 20% of its net profits to buy back BNB and eventually destroy 100 million BNB tokens, according to the whitepaper. After every BNB burning, Binance publishes a disclosure report. So far, Binance has had six quarterly BNB burns, in which it destroyed a little over 10.8 million BNB. Every burn is done based on BNB price on the day of the burn, which means that if the BNB totals are multiplied by the price of BNB on the day of the burn, we can get a USD equivalent of 20% of the profits. Binance’s profit is simply five times the USD equivalent of each burn, if the firm is staying true to its whitepaper commitment.
The report indicated that Binance has brought in approximately $655 million since the exchange launched. In the third quarter of 2017, its profit was of nearly $7.5 million, as it burned a total of 986,000 BNB tokens in October of that year, at the time worth roughly $1.5 million. In Q4 of that year, its profits were of $201 million, as the BNB burn amounted to over $40 million. While this was its best quarter, it has since then been making over $100 million in profits, until Q3 of 2018.
In Q3 of last year, the company made $80 million in profit, and in Q4 it made roughly $49 million. Throughout the stated period, Binance has burned a total of 10.8 million BNB tokens, worth a total of little over $131 million. Its total profit was of $655 million
The analysis also showed that the profits of the exchange seemed to correlate with the swings in the market, earning more money in the bull cycles, and less in the bear cycles.
These numbers fall just short of the predictions that Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao made for the company in July, when he told Bloomberg that he expected to see $500 million in profits by the end of 2018.
According to CryptoCompare’s December 2018 Exchange Review, Binance has managed to maintain its status as the number one crypto exchange in the industry. The document shows that an average of $664 million worth of cryptocurrencies were traded on the exchange each day.
