BNB was launched through an Initial Coin Offering (or ICO) that took place from June 26th to July 3rd, 2017 - 11 days before the Binance Exchange opened for trading. The issue price was 1 ETH for 2,700 BNB or 1 BTC for 20,000 BNB. Although BNB was launched through an ICO, BNB does not provide users with a claim on Binance profits and does not represent an investment in Binance.
BNB was originally issued as an ERC-20 token, running on the Ethereum network, with a total supply of 200 million coins. 100 million BNB was offered in the ICO, but the current total supply is lower due to periodic burning events and a real-time burning mechanism. If you want to know more about coin burns, and why BNBs are being permanently destroyed, check out What Is a Coin Burn?.
Although initially based on the Ethereum network, the ERC-20 BNB tokens were later swapped with BEP-2 BNB at a 1:1 ratio. The BEP-2 BNB is the native coin of the Binance Chain, and the mainnet launch was announced on April 18th, 2019.
In September 2020, Binance launched the BNB Smart Chain, a blockchain network that runs in parallel with the BNB Beacon Chain. This means that you can now find BNB in three different forms:
BNB BEP-2 on the BNB Beacon Chain (formerly Binance Chain).
BNB BEP-20 on the BNB Smart Chain(formerly Binance Smart Chain).