BNB ETF Explained: VanEck VBNB, Fees, Staking and What the Flows Show
One US BNB ETF exists: VanEck VBNB, Nasdaq, 28 May 2026, 0.39% fee, no staking, Anchorage custody. In 77 trading days it printed four non-zero flow days and about $1.1m net.
TL;DR. There is exactly one spot BNB ETF in the United States: VanEck's VBNB, listed on Nasdaq on 28 May 2026 with a 0.39% sponsor fee, Anchorage Digital Bank as custodian and no staking at launch. The token's supply is cut every quarter by a burn that removed 1,615,828 BNB (about $932m) on 15 July 2026, leaving 133.17m against a target of 100m. Demand for the wrapper has been thin: over 77 trading days to 16 September the fund printed four non-zero flow days and roughly $1.1m of net creations. Grayscale has a rival filed but not listed. Europe has had BNB ETPs since 2019.
What a BNB ETF actually is
A spot BNB ETF is a US-listed trust that holds BNB tokens and issues shares against them. Buy a share through an ordinary brokerage account and you own a slice of the BNB in the trust, minus the fee, with no wallet and no key to lose.
Authorised participants deliver cash or BNB to the trust in blocks of 10,000 shares (a "Basket" in the prospectus and the 10-K; a financial-statement note mentions 25,000, but the 21 August 2026 redemption was exactly 10,000) and receive new shares; redemptions run the other way. Those creations and redemptions are what a daily flow number measures; trading between two shareholders on Nasdaq doesn't touch it. How to read Bitcoin ETF flows covers the distinction, and the authorised-participant mechanism explains who does the creating.
Legally it's a Delaware statutory trust under the Securities Act of 1933, not a 1940 Act investment company, so shareholders don't get the protections that apply to mutual funds. The prospectus says so plainly; it's the sentence most buyers skip.
The fund at a glance
| Item | VanEck BNB ETF (VBNB) |
|---|---|
| Exchange | Nasdaq, under Rule 5711(d) for commodity-based trust shares |
| First trading day | 28 May 2026 |
| Sponsor fee | 0.39% a year, covering ordinary operating expenses |
| Sponsor | VanEck Digital Assets, LLC |
| BNB custodian | Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., cold storage |
| Administrator and cash custodian | State Street Bank and Trust Company |
| Pricing benchmark | MarketVector BNB Index (MarketVector is a VanEck affiliate) |
| Staking | None at listing; sponsor may add it later with regulatory approval |
| Creation unit | 10,000 shares, cash or in-kind |
| Holdings | 3,885 BNB, market value about $2.39m, as of 19 August 2026 (VanEck holdings disclosure) |
Two things stand out. HODL, VanEck's Bitcoin trust, is custodied at Gemini (see the VanEck HODL review); VBNB went to Anchorage, so custody is chosen per fund. And 0.39% is the highest fee in VanEck's spot crypto line: VAVX, its Avalanche fund, charges 0.30%.
What BNB is, and how the burn works
BNB began in 2017 as an ERC-20 token sold to fund the Binance exchange. Today BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain) is an EVM-compatible network where BNB pays gas, secures validators through staking and carries governance votes. VanEck's launch material cites more than 14 million transactions a day; the prospectus put BNB's market capitalisation at roughly $150bn as of 31 October 2025. The original utility hasn't gone away: holding BNB still earns trading fee discounts on Binance, and the prospectus lists that use first. That's what separates this asset from Bitcoin, Ether or Solana: its value is bound up with one commercial company.
Two burns run in parallel. The quarterly Auto-Burn, introduced in late 2021, sets the amount by formula from the number of blocks produced in the quarter and BNB's average dollar price. The real-time burn under BEP-95 destroys a share of the gas fees in every block; BNB Chain put that total at about 291,000 BNB as of July 2026. Both send tokens to a dead address, so anyone can check them on-chain.
| Burn (2026) | Date | BNB destroyed | Approx. value | Supply after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 34th | 15 January | 1,371,704 | $1.29bn | n/a |
| 35th | 15 April | 1,569,307 | $1.02bn | 134,786,917 |
| 36th | 15 July | 1,615,828 | $932m | 133,166,128 |
The target is 100 million BNB, down from 200 million issued. At 1.4 to 1.6 million a quarter that's five or six more years, though the formula scales inversely with price: a rally slows the burn, a crash speeds it up. The 37th burn is due around mid-October 2026. VanEck's risk factor adds the caveat that matters for a fund holder: the mechanism "does not guarantee a fixed or minimum future supply," because Binance sets the rules and can change them.
The regulatory oddity, and the staking that didn't ship
An ETF on a token issued by an exchange is a first for the US. In 2023 Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao settled with the Department of Justice, OFAC, FinCEN and the CFTC over anti-money-laundering, sanctions and registration failures. The SEC's separate civil case, which alleged BNB was an unregistered security, was dismissed in 2025 at the SEC's own request. Zhao has since received a presidential pardon. All three facts appear in VBNB's prospectus, which also says Binance "exerts centralized control over critical token attributes including burn mechanisms, distribution protocols, utility features, staking rewards, and technological infrastructure." No Bitcoin fund can say anything similar about anyone.
Listing was possible anyway because the SEC approved generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares in September 2025, replacing the one-product-at-a-time 19b-4 fight with a checklist. It's the same door the Hyperliquid funds walked through, as described in our Hyperliquid ETF explainer. VanEck filed its first BNB S-1 in May 2025 and Amendment No. 5 on 15 May 2026; Nasdaq certified the listing on 27 May.
Grayscale filed a competing Grayscale BNB Trust (proposed ticker GBNB) in January 2026, amended it three times by June, and hasn't listed. Until it does, VBNB is the whole US market; the full list of 2026 crypto ETFs shows where BNB sits among the other new assets.
Then there's staking. VanEck's original filing was widely reported as a BNB ETF with staking. The final prospectus says: "At the time the Shares are listed on the Exchange, the Trust will not employ its BNB in Staking Activities and accordingly will not earn any form of staking rewards." The sponsor keeps the option to stake later through third-party providers, subject to approval, with no assurance it happens. That's a real cost: BNB stakes natively, so a token holder earns a reward the shareholder forgoes, on top of the 0.39% fee. Compare the Hyperliquid funds, where all three sponsors stake from day one, or the fight over staking in Ethereum ETFs.
How we derive VBNB's flows
No aggregator publishes daily BNB ETF flows the way Farside or CoinGlass do for Bitcoin, so cryptoetf.today computes them from VanEck's own disclosures. VanEck doesn't post shares outstanding, and the headline net assets are rounded to two decimals of a million, useless for a fund this size. What it does publish daily is the holdings block: the number of BNB in the trust and its market value, with a one-day lag (on 20 August the file showed 19 August).
The flow for a day is therefore the change in BNB held, multiplied by that day's BNB price:
flow(T) = (BNB in trust on T+1 minus BNB in trust on T) x BNB price on T
For an in-kind fund this equals the share-count method used for Bitcoin funds, less a sliver for the sponsor fee, which is paid in BNB. The series starts on 28 May 2026; the stretch before our own daily snapshots began was back-filled from an aggregator and reconciled against the issuer figure. Weekends are empty because no baskets can be created. A change of a few BNB, far below one basket, is fee accrual rather than a creation, so the series is rounded to $0.1m. The result is on the BNB ETF flows page, updated every business day, and it's the same series the Bitcoin ETF Flow Tracker app shows.
What the flows show so far
Not much, and that's the finding. Of 77 trading days between 28 May and 16 September 2026, seventy-three show zero. The rest:
| Date | Net flow | BNB price |
|---|---|---|
| 3 June 2026 | +$1.2m | $620.63 |
| 11 June 2026 | +$0.2m | $605.76 |
| 21 August 2026 | −$0.26m | $687.00 |
| 1 September 2026 | rounding-level residual | $691.36 |
Cumulative net flow is roughly +$1.1m. The one meaningful creation, a single basket in early June, arrived in the fund's first week; nothing has come in since 11 June, and 21 August was the first redemption. Over the same stretch BNB rose from $638 to $712, with a low of $546.52 on 30 June and a high of $752.11 on 9 September. Price did 12%; the fund's asset base was flat. Whatever drove that move happened somewhere other than a US ETF. (The gap between $1.1m of flows and about $2.4m of assets is the launch seed plus the price rise.)
For scale, here is where the other new-asset funds stood in cumulative net flows as of 20 August 2026, from the same issuer-derived data:
| Asset | US spot funds | Cumulative net flow | Tracked since |
|---|---|---|---|
| HYPE | 3 (BHYP, THYP, HYPG) | $288.0m | 12 May 2026 |
| LINK | 2 (GLNK, CLNK) | $137.5m | 2 Dec 2025 |
| HBAR | 1 (HBR) | $106.6m | 28 Oct 2025 |
| AVAX | 3 (VAVX, GAVA, BAVA) | $25.4m | 26 Jan 2026 |
| DOGE | 3 (GDOG, BWOW, TDOG) | $12.3m | 24 Nov 2025 |
| LTC | 1 (LTCC) | $10.3m | 28 Oct 2025 |
| DOT | 1 (TDOT) | $1.9m | 6 Mar 2026 |
| BNB | 1 (VBNB) | $1.4m | 28 May 2026 |
BNB is the largest asset on that list by market value and the smallest by ETF demand. The plausible reading: people who want BNB already hold it on Binance, where it earns discounts and can be staked, and institutions who buy through ETFs haven't decided an exchange-linked token belongs in a mandate.
What to watch
- Concentration in the wrapper. One fund, one sponsor, one custodian, and a share count where a single basket is most of the history. A fund this size can trade at a visible premium or discount to NAV; check the spread before a market order.
- Binance. Enforcement, an outage or a change to fee discounts would hit BNB in a way no other ETF asset is exposed to.
- Supply. The mid-October Auto-Burn and the BEP-95 running total. Fewer tokens don't guarantee a higher price, but a trust holding a fixed number of BNB owns a growing share of the total.
- Grayscale GBNB and staking. A second US fund would be the first competitive signal, and a prospectus supplement announcing staking would change the fund's economics overnight.
BNB ETPs outside the US, and who VBNB is for
Europe got here first, by seven years. 21Shares' Binance BNB ETP (ticker ABNB, ISIN CH0496454155) launched on 15 October 2019, is Swiss-domiciled, physically backed and custodied at BitGo Europe. It lists on SIX, Euronext, Borsa Italiana and Xetra, charges a 2.50% total expense ratio, and held about $13.6m as of 16 September 2026. CoinShares launched the CoinShares BNB Staking ETP (CBNB) on SIX on 4 March 2026 with a 0% management fee and a 0.25% staking yield, per its press release.
Both are European exchange-traded notes, unavailable through a US broker, and we don't track their flows. On carry the comparison is unflattering: a European holder can pay nothing and receive yield, while a US holder pays 0.39% and receives none. What the US fund offers instead is a Nasdaq listing, SEC reporting and IRA eligibility.
So the case for VBNB is narrow. If your money sits in a retirement account, it's the only way to own BNB there. If your mandate permits listed securities and forbids self-custodied tokens, likewise. If you'd rather pay 0.39% than run a wallet and a Binance account, that's a fair trade too. Otherwise the token is cheaper to hold, earns rewards and discounts the fund can't pass on, and trades around the clock. That arithmetic is why the flow series looks the way it does, and it'll stay that way until something in the list above changes. Follow it on the BNB ETF flows tracker.
FAQ
Is there a BNB ETF in the US?
Yes, one: the VanEck BNB ETF, ticker VBNB, which began trading on Nasdaq on 28 May 2026. It holds BNB directly, charges 0.39% and uses Anchorage Digital Bank as custodian. Grayscale’s proposed GBNB had not listed as of September 2026.
Does the VanEck BNB ETF stake its BNB?
Not at launch. The prospectus states the trust will not stake at listing and will not earn staking rewards, while reserving the right to stake through third-party providers later if regulators allow.
What is the BNB ETF fee?
VBNB charges a 0.39% annual sponsor fee covering ordinary operating costs, above VanEck Avalanche (VAVX) at 0.30% and well below the 2.50% of the 21Shares Binance BNB ETP in Europe.
How much money has flowed into the BNB ETF?
Very little. Over 77 trading days from 28 May to 16 September 2026 the fund recorded four non-zero flow days and roughly $1.1m of cumulative net creations, with no inflow since 11 June. It held 3,885 BNB as of 19 August 2026.
How are BNB ETF flows calculated if VanEck does not publish them?
From the daily holdings disclosure. VanEck reports how many BNB the trust holds each day, so the flow is the change in BNB held multiplied by that day’s price, which for an in-kind fund matches the share-count method used for Bitcoin ETFs.
Why is a BNB ETF unusual compared with a Bitcoin ETF?
BNB was issued by an exchange, Binance, which still controls the burn schedule and grants fee discounts to holders. The prospectus lists the 2023 US settlements, the dismissed SEC case and the founder’s pardon as risk factors; no other US crypto ETF is tied to a single company that way.
Does the BNB burn help ETF holders?
Indirectly. Quarterly Auto-Burns removed 1.57m BNB in April and 1.62m in July 2026, cutting supply to about 133.2m against a 100m target. A trust holding a fixed number of BNB owns a slowly rising share of supply, but Binance sets the burn rules and they are not guaranteed.
Sources and further reading
- VanEck BNB ETF, Form S-1/A (Registration No. 333-286959): structure, custodian, staking language, Binance risk factors — sec.gov.
- VanEck launch release, 28 May 2026 — vaneck.com; fund page and holdings — vaneck.com.
- BNB Chain, 36th quarterly burn, 15 July 2026 — bnbchain.org.
- Grayscale BNB Trust, Form S-1/A — sec.gov.
- 21Shares Binance BNB ETP (ABNB) — 21shares.com; CoinShares BNB Staking ETP launch, 4 March 2026 — coinshares.com.
- Daily data: BNB ETF flows tracker. Internal: VanEck HODL review, Hyperliquid ETF explained.
