Growth And A Catalyst Make Binance Coin More Interesting

Summary Binance Coin USD remains a 'hold' due to centralization risks and stretched valuation multiples despite impressive usage growth and recent positive news ￰0￱ outperforms Ethereum in daily transactions and active addresses, but lags Ethereum in DeFi TVL, stablecoin supply, and RWA market ￰1￱ multiples for BNB, such as price to fees and market cap to TVL, suggest the token is not cheap compared to Ethereum or ￰2￱ exposure to BNB could be considered at the right price, but Solana may offer a stronger growth and value proposition ￰3￱ has been 9 full months since I wrote an article for Seeking Alpha focused on Binance Coin USD ( BNB-USD ) ￰4￱ the backdrop of President Trump pardoning Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ for short), I think it's worth revisiting the investment thesis for ￰5￱ this update, I'll briefly recap my call history and biggest concern with BNB to this point.

We'll then go over key on-chain metrics for BNB that I find to be ￰6￱ Recap My coverage history with BNB has been considerably more cautious than I have been with other blockchain ￰7￱ fact, I called BNB a 'sell' three times in 2023: My BNB Coverage History (Seeking Alpha) While I upgraded BNB to a 'hold' back in January, I've long held the view that Binance has a considerable amount of governance centralization risk when compared with other L1 Blockchain networks like Ethereum ( ETH-USD ). Compared to other networks, BNB utilizes a much smaller amount of validators; of which, the top 8 control over 40% of the staked ￰8￱ my general bearish caution, the native token of BNB has admittedly performed quite well since the start of the year: Data by YCharts With BNB now up over 60% year to date and performing well ahead of L1 peers that I'm personally long like ETH or Solana ( SOL-USD ), it's time to take another look at the chains fundamentally as Binance founder CZ is pardoned by President ￰9￱ Metrics: BNB ￰10￱ For the benefit of comparison, I'd like to primarily use Ethereum as BNB's contextual ￰11￱ Ethereum is roughly 3x the size of BNB based on market capitalization, no other L1 network token is closer in value to ETH than BNB from a circulating cap ￰12￱ this section, we'll look at key network metrics like transactions, daily active addresses (or DAAs), DeFi TVL, and stablecoin numbers.

First, daily transactions: Data by YCharts Here we can see BNB (formerly Binance Smart Chain) has a substantial lead over ￰13￱ is currently processing over 22 million transactions per ￰14￱ only is this far more than Ethereum nominally, but it also shows a better overall ￰15￱ current levels, daily transactions on BNB have risen substantially throughout 2025 and are even ahead of the prior cycle ￰16￱ is roughly in line with its prior cycle ￰17￱ DAAs, 5 yr trend (Artemis) Where Ethereum has had stability in the usage department for the last five years and has generally grown through secondary layers, BNB is showing exploding usage with 2.4 million average DAAs during the month of ￰18￱ by Chain, 10/24/25 (DeFi Llama) Yet, based on raw TVL figures, Ethereum continues to be the boss in the market with a 62.9% share of total value ￰19￱ Solana has a larger share of TVL than BNB .

Furthermore, Ethereum's share of the RWA market is slightly above 53%, while BNB's share of RWA is just 2.7%. Ethereum actually has a larger share of RWA than BNB from 3 different scaling ￰20￱ Supply by Chain, 10/24/25 (DeFi Llama) At $14 billion in stablecoin supply, BNB comes in at 4th in the market behind Solana, Tron ( TRX-USD ), and Ethereum; with the latter again commanding more than half of the market share. However, despite not having nearly as large a stablecoin footprint as Ethereum or Tron, BNB's stablecoin active address figure has been top of the market in eight out of nine months this year: Stablecoin Active Addresses by Chain (Artemis) During the month of September, 11.1 million active addresses engaged with stablecoins on BNB - this was well ahead of Ethereum, which came in at just 3 ￰21￱ September, Ethereum processed $1.8 trillion in stablecoin transfer volume compared with $442 billion for ￰22￱ the difference in ratios for stablecoin supply (8:1 favoring ETH) and stablecoin transfer volume (4:1 favoring ETH), BNB has a higher 'velocity of money' on the ￰23￱ would imply stickier usage on BNB than on ￰24￱ it's important to remember that Ethereum has a massive L2 ￰25￱ that, I think it's important to consider valuation multiples before jumping into any BNB long ￰26￱ Multiples There are two general valuation multiples that I like to look at for smart contract chains, price to fees and market cap to ￰27￱ on the first one, BNB and ETH are very closely valued: FDMC to Fees (Artemis) At 1.2k for BNB and 1.1k for ETH, the increases in token prices this year for both Ethereum and BNB have arguably been more driven by multiple expansion than anything ￰28￱ instance, Solana's users and daily transactions dwarf BNB's, yet that network trades at 272x fully diluted ￰29￱ to TVL (Artemis) Factoring in the DeFi angle, fully diluted market cap to TVL favors Ethereum in a big way at just 5x TVL.

Again, we see multiple expansions for BNB, which now trades at 24x ￰30￱ is in the middle of each with an 11x TVL multiple in ￰31￱ based on both fully diluted cap to fees and fully diluted cap to TVL, I think it's hard to make the case that BNB is 'cheap' at current ￰32￱ Takeaways If you can get beyond what I think are legitimate centralization concerns for BNB, it's difficult to argue with the usage growth story for the ￰33￱ with what could reasonably be viewed as a positive news catalyst for Binance with CZ being pardoned, you could talk me into a speculative BNB proxy like the Osprey BNB Trust ( OBNB ) if it were to trade at a considerable discount to NAV (it currently doesn't).

That said, for raw usage growth through DAAs and transactions, there is probably a stronger case for Solana when factoring in valuation multiples. I'm going to reiterate the 'hold' for BNB, but I am coming around on the idea of exposure at the right price.