Coinbase Plans to List Surging BNB After Previously Delisting Binance Stablecoin

Coinbase added BNB to its listing roadmap on Wednesday, signaling support for the cryptocurrency issued by its biggest competitor, Binance.

Offered to the public through an initial coin offering in 2017, the asset—which can be used for transaction fees on Binance’s platform—is currently the fourth-largest digital asset by market capitalization, worth $164 billion, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko.

Although the asset will lack any utility within Coinbase’s ecosystem, the San Francisco-based exchange effectively extended an olive branch to Binance because BNB has historically been hard to access in the U.S. Fellow rival Kraken, for example, listed the token in April.

“Stronger together,” Kraken said on X then.

Despite being more difficult to access in the U.S., BNB has outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum over the past year, rising 98% to $1,165 from $593 a year before. It has recently surged to new all-time highs, peaking at about $1,370 on Monday. The outperformance coincides with U.S. regulators adopting a more collaborative approach to the industry.

Prior to last week’s historic liquidation cascade, some analysts pointed to growing interest in BNB Chain-based decentralized exchange Aster as a factor driving BNB’s recent rally.

Before Binance agreed to a $4.3 billion settlement with U.S. authorities to resolve criminal charges in 2023, the SEC began scrutinizing BNB’s origins separately for potential securities laws violations, per Bloomberg. In June, the SEC filed to dismiss the lawsuit that it had brought against Binance, founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, and its sister company in 2023.

Earlier this week, Binance said in a now-deleted post on X that it “does not profit” from tokens being listed on its platform. Not long before, CJ Hetherington, CEO of prediction market maker Limitless Labs, had made that exact allegation on X, while praising Coinbase. 

That same day, Jesse Pollak, creator of Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, said on X that “it should cost 0% to be listed on an exchange,” in reference to token allocations.

Coinbase Ventures was among several investors that participated in a $4 million strategic funding round for Limitless Labs in June, according to cryptorank.

Coinbase may be adding a Binance-focused cryptocurrency to its trading platform, but the crypto exchange removed a Binance-branded stablecoin in the past.

Coinbase said that it would delist BUSD in early 2023, two weeks after Paxos Trust said that it would no longer mint the Binance-branded stablecoin due to regulatory scrutiny. Around that time, Paxos said that it was anticipating an SEC lawsuit related to the product.

“Our determination to suspend trading for BUSD is based on our own internal monitoring and review processes,” a Coinbase spokesperson told Decrypt then. “When reviewing BUSD, we determined that it no longer met our listing standards and will be suspended.”