Steemit Crypto Academy Season 2 Week 1 Task | Altcoins – Part1 "Looking beyond the Bitcoin" | lecture by @yohan2on

Dear, Steemians. It's an honour to be here again at this moment as I've learned from the Steemit crypto professor @yohan2on as the professor moved on with his lectures and this time he discussed more about Altcoins and in this article, I am going to talk about Binance coin (BNB).

Altcoins is not a strange name in the crypto ecosystem and it's simply the general name used for other cryptocurriencies aside Bitcoin. Remember, the earliest cryptocurrency is Bitcoin and since the full implementation of Bitcoin in the year 2009, other crypto companies has been on the rise to create their own cryptocurrency and that gave birth to Altcoins. BNB, USDT, ETH, REEF, ANKR, FET, TRX, APPC and so on, are all Altcoins.

Altcoins can also be termed as "Alternative coins" which expressed that they are alternative coins to Bitcoin. The birth of altcoins was also accompanied with several blockchains other than Bitcoin and an example is the Ethereum blockchain which brings several innovations to the crypto ecosystem.

Binance coin is the native cryptocurrency of Binance crypto exchange which is a well known crypto exchange in the world under the CEO, Changpeng Zhao who is a business executive. The Binance coin (BNB) first came into limelight way back, year 2017 and initially operated on the Ethereum blockchain which makes it an ERC-20 token at the time of inception.

In a short while, Binance cryptocurrency was moved to its native and own blockchain which is Binance Chain. BNB has been a very strong cryptocurrency on the Binance exchange used for trading, paying other trading transaction fees and so on. Research revealed that BNB crypto is burned quarterly whereby Binance uses 20% of its total profit to buy the BNB crypto again and burn it completely to total destruction, this process is well listed in the coin's whitepaper and Binance has strictly adhered to the custom.

I will like to say a few things about BNB's ICO, BNB token was first offered through ICO in the year 2017 with 15,000,000 USD raised during the fundraising period. Having 200 million BNB created, It is to be noted that 100 Million BNB was made available for a presale and all was sold at 15℅ per token. The distribution was done in percentages which saw; 40% (80 million BNB) distributed to the founding team, 10% (20 million BNB) distributed to the Angel investors and the remaining 50% (100 million BNB) distributed in presale.

One of the first thing that interest me about Binance coin is the low fees of transaction, I've transferred the coin to other platforms many times and I can say the transaction fee is relatively low. The screenshot below shows my transaction of the coin amounting to $19.5 (0.05 BNB) and only 0.0005 BNB (0.03 USD) was used as the transaction fee

Binance coin runs perfectly on three networks namely; BEP2 (which has the address often start with bnb and has memo tag to receive in Binance wallet), BEP20 (BSC) and ERC20 (BEP20 and ERC20 addresses are the same in Binance wallet and often start with 0x).

On the Binance exchange, this coin is used for trading and also to pay for other trading transaction fees, to buy other fiat currency or cryptocurrencies. The smart contract compatibility is another great use and this utilizes the BNB on BSC network to effectively interact with smart contracts on DApps.

The screenshot above from my wallet shows how BNB can be used to interact with smart contracts for instant swapping and it is also used for the liquidity fee of the transaction.

BNB is available with numerous pairs on Binance which makes it easy for exchange to other fiat currency or cryptos and it was listed recently listed on Coinbase.

In conclusion, Altcoins in general has made some drastic changes in the crypto ecosystem giving the entire blockchain populace a wide option to choose preferred one for investment and brought some innovations for a improved blockchain. BNB is quite a wonderful altcoin with a lot of uses and benefits as stated in my article and it's doing well for investment. Thanks to the Steemit crypto professor @yohan2on for this great avenue.