What if you bought BNB in 2018?
Crypto · Exchange token. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play75.0× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
$1,000 in BNB at the start of 2018 would be worth about $75,000 today — 75.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
BNB was issued in a July 2017 initial coin offering by Binance, a then-new crypto exchange founded by Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ. It started as a token that gave traders a discount on fees, and Binance committed to periodically burning tokens to shrink supply. Binance grew with astonishing speed into the world's largest crypto exchange, and BNB expanded into the native currency of the BNB Chain, a cheaper alternative to Ethereum for decentralised applications. That combination took the token from cents to around $600 by 2021.
The flipside was regulatory exposure. In November 2023 Binance pleaded guilty in the US to violations including anti-money-laundering failures and agreed to pay over $4 billion; CZ stepped down and served a short prison sentence in 2024 before receiving a presidential pardon in 2025. Remarkably, BNB held most of its value through all this, in contrast to FTX's token a year earlier. Its value remains closely tied to the fortunes of one company, which is precisely what makes it unusual among large cryptocurrencies.
The lesson: An exchange token is a concentrated bet on one company and its founder, without the legal claims of a shareholder; survival depends on trust in that firm.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $8.00 | $75,000 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $14.00 | $42,857 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $75,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,519.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. BNB is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in Crypto
- What if you bought Bitcoin?
- What if you bought Ethereum?
- What if you bought Litecoin?
- What if you bought XRP?
- What if you bought Dogecoin?
- What if you bought Cardano?