Binance to burn $2B idle BUSD on Feb. 22
The BUSD collateral on the Ethereum network will be released after the burn.
Binance announced that it would burn $2 billion worth of idle Binance USD (BUSD) on BNB Chain “later today” on Feb. 22 at 12:07 UTC.
The same amount of BUSD held as a collateral on the Ethereum (ETH) chain will be released after the burn.
The BUSD marketcap recorded a 15% drop and saw its 14-month low at $13.7 billion on Feb. 17. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) noticed the drop and stated that the “landscape is shifting.”
He said:
“BUSD market cap dropped -$2.45B (from 16.1B to 13.7B as of now), and most of it has moved to USDT.
USDT marketcap + 2.37B (From 67.8B to 70.1B)
USDC also declined -739M (from 42.3B to 41.5B).”
This was four days after the Securities and Exchange Comission (SEC) issued a warning to BUSD issuer Paxos on Feb. 13 and asked them to stop further BUSD creation. Between Feb. 13 and Feb. 17, Binance’s BUSD holdings fell by 16% and dropped to around 12.1 billion tokens.
The burn still hasn’t commenced at the time of writing.