Binance USD Statistics 2026: BUSD Wind-Down and Supply

Binance USD (BUSD) peaked at $23.5 billion in market capitalization on November 15, 2022, the moment Paxos’s USD-collateralized stablecoin briefly rivaled USDC as the second-largest fiat-backed token in crypto. Today, the Paxos-issued BUSD ERC-20 trades at a market capitalization of about $37.75 million, ranked 594 by CoinGecko, with a residual supply that exists only so onboarded customers can still redeem at par.

Key Takeaways

• NYDFS ordered Paxos to cease minting Paxos-issued BUSD, citing unresolved issues in Paxos’s oversight of its Binance relationship; Paxos notified customers of the wind-down on February 13, 2023.
• BUSD’s all-time high market cap of $23.5 billion was recorded on November 15, 2022, per CoinGecko historical data. Today, the Paxos-issued ERC-20 token holds a market cap of approximately $37.75 million with approximately 37.84 million tokens circulating.
• Paxos guaranteed BUSD redemptions through at least February 2024, while ceasing all new issuance effective February 21, 2023. The redemption window remained 1:1 USD-backed in fully segregated bankruptcy-remote accounts throughout.
• First Digital USD (FDUSD) circulates at approximately $381 million across supported chains, a tiny fraction of the BUSD supply, the Binance-promoted replacement inherited.
• The SEC issued Paxos a Wells Notice on February 3, 2023, alleging that BUSD was an unregistered security. The SEC formally terminated the investigation on July 9, 2024, with no enforcement action.
• NYDFS announced a $48.5 million Paxos settlement on August 6, 2025, comprising a $26.5 million penalty and $22 million in remediation investments. The investigation found $1.6 billion in transactions involving illicit actors flowed to or from Binance between 2017 and 2022.
• DefiLlama still tracks two separate BUSD tokens: Paxos-issued BUSD at approximately $37.78 million circulating and Binance-Peg BUSD at approximately $232.81 million circulating across 12 chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, BSC, Polygon, and Base.

Editor’s Choice

• The Paxos-issued BUSD ERC-20 token currently sits at market cap rank 594 on CoinGecko, with the contract at 0x4fabb145d64652a948d72533023f6e7a623c7c53.
• BUSD touched an all-time intraday price of $2.58 on November 10, 2024, a depegging spike, a clear signal that liquidity had collapsed long before the supply did.
• The NYDFS settlement narrative confirms that Paxos formed its Binance partnership after being chartered as a limited-purpose trust company in 2015, distributing BUSD without “appropriate controls in place to effectively monitor for significant illicit activity”.
• NYDFS describes itself as “the first regulator in the world to address safety and soundness concerns related to Binance,” overseeing the “first orderly winddown of a stablecoin” in 2023.
• Top stablecoin supplies as of May 2026: USDT at $189.52 billion, USDC at $76.99 billion, USDS at $8.83 billion, with PYUSD at $3.49 billion, none of which is a Binance-branded asset.
• Paxos still operates under NYDFS supervision, and the regulator authorized only the Ethereum-blockchain Paxos-issued BUSD; Binance-Peg BUSD on other chains was never under NYDFS authority. Residual Binance-Peg supply now lives on 12 chains outside NYDFS reach.
• The Paxos Wells Notice response on February 3, 2023, stated: “BUSD issued by Paxos is always backed 1:1 with US dollar-denominated reserves, fully segregated and held in bankruptcy remote accounts”.

Recent Developments

• August 2025 (2025-08-06): NYDFS announced the $48.5 million Paxos settlement covering AML deficiencies and Binance diligence failures. Superintendent Adrienne A. Harris’s statement closed three years of investigation into the partnership.
• July 2024 (2024-07-11): Paxos disclosed it received a formal SEC termination notice on July 9, 2024, ending the BUSD-as-security investigation with no enforcement action.
• May 2026 (2026-05-20): DefiLlama snapshot shows BUSD residual supply at approximately $37.78 million (Paxos-issued) and approximately $232.81 million (Binance-Peg), while FDUSD circulates at approximately $381.37 million.
• January 2024 (2024-01-02): Binance auto-converted residual BUSD balances on its exchange to FDUSD at 1:1, completing the in-app phase-out following the December 15, 2023, trading-pair removal.
• February 2023 (2023-02-21): Paxos ceased issuance of new BUSD tokens “as directed by and in coordination with the New York Department of Financial Services,” while pledging continued redemptions through at least February 2024.

How Big Was BUSD at Its Peak?

BUSD’s market story is bookended by two numbers. The token was launched as a Paxos-issued, NYDFS-supervised dollar stablecoin and grew alongside Binance’s trading-pair preferencing strategy.

• According to CoinGecko data cited by Cryptonews, BUSD’s market cap reached an all-time high of $23.5 billion on November 15, 2022, shortly after FTX’s bankruptcy filing drove stablecoin demand toward issuers with visible reserve audits like Paxos’s NYDFS-supervised BUSD.

Sources: CoinGecko, DefiLlama

The peak-to-residual contraction is approximately 99.8%, leaving the Paxos-issued ERC-20 token at roughly one-six-hundredth of its all-time high market capitalization. The unwind is steeper than the contraction profile of stablecoin during the same broader cycle.

By the numbers: BUSD’s market cap fell from a $23.5 billion peak to about $37.75 million in Paxos-issued supply, a roughly 99.8% contraction across the wind-down window. The CoinGecko market-cap rank moved to 594 over the same period.

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How the BUSD Wind-Down Unfolded

The wind-down ran on two parallel tracks. On the issuer side, Paxos halted new minting under the NYDFS order while honoring redemptions. On the exchange side, Binance shows how the exchange progressively removed BUSD trading pairs and force-converted residual balances on its platform.

Sources: NYDFS, Paxos newsroom, Binance announcements

Paxos’s February 13 announcement guaranteed redemption availability through at least February 2024 for onboarded customers, with reserves continuing to be 1:1 backed and audited by a top-four accounting firm. NYDFS itself confirmed in its consumer alert that Paxos must redeem BUSD tokens for U.S. dollars at a 1:1 rate for customers in good standing.

Binance refunded holders by mechanism, not by check. Users who held BUSD on the exchange at the cutover saw their balances converted to FDUSD automatically, with no claim form or waiting period. Users who held BUSD in self-custody could (and still can) onboard with Paxos to redeem the token for U.S. dollars at par.

What Replaced BUSD on Binance?

The successor narrative was that FDUSD would inherit BUSD’s role as Binance’s preferred fiat-backed stablecoin. That role transferred; the supply did not.

FDUSD’s circulating supply of about $381 million is roughly 1.6% of BUSD’s $23.5 billion all-time-high market capitalization, a sharp reminder that the Binance-branded stablecoin slot is no longer the prime distribution channel for fiat-backed tokens. USDT circulates at $189.52 billion and USDC at $76.99 billion as of May 2026, the two-issuer scale that BUSD had briefly challenged at its peak.

The “Binance can manufacture its own stablecoin moat” thesis is settled. Three years after the wind-down began, FDUSD has not approached BUSD’s peak by any measure of supply, trading volume, or chain coverage. Binance’s exchange flow now leans on USDT pairs and selective FDUSD pairs rather than a house token.

The two issuers that absorbed the redirected demand are also the two that have meaningfully differentiated themselves on chain footprint and reserve disclosure, a pattern visible in the USDC vs USDT supply trajectory across the same window.

Paxos-Issued vs Binance-Peg BUSD: Two Tokens, Two Trajectories

A detail competitors collapse: there are two BUSDs, not one. The Paxos-issued ERC-20 on Ethereum is the NYDFS-authorized stablecoin, contractually 1:1 USD-backed and subject to redemption. The “Binance-Peg BUSD” is a separate token Binance issued on alternative chains (BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum, others) backed by Paxos-issued BUSD held in a Binance-controlled reserve, never directly under NYDFS supervision.

• NYDFS made the distinction explicit in its 2023 consumer alert: “The Department authorized Paxos to issue BUSD on the Ethereum blockchain. The Department has not authorized Binance-Peg BUSD on any blockchain, and Binance-Peg BUSD is not issued by Paxos.”

Source: DefiLlama, NYDFS

Binance-Peg BUSD at approximately $232.81 million is approximately six times the Paxos-issued circulating supply, a counterintuitive result given that Binance officially deprecated BUSD products on its own exchange in December 2023. Most of the Binance-Peg supply lives on BSC and other non-Ethereum chains where the bridge has not been unwound, leaving a long tail of holders whose tokens are still tradeable on DEXes even after the centralized-exchange phase-out.

The ratio of Binance-Peg to Paxos-issued BUSD circulating supply is approximately 6.16-to-one as of May 2026, meaning the bulk of remaining BUSD lives on chains NYDFS never authorized, with a redemption path that requires bridging to Ethereum before Paxos will honor it at par.

What the NYDFS Settlement Revealed

The settlement was the regulatory bookend, not the beginning. Years after ordering Paxos to halt minting, NYDFS resolved the matter and disclosed why the partnership had been ordered to wind down.

• Settlement structure: $26.5 million penalty paid to New York State plus $22 million invested in Paxos’s compliance program and remediation pursuant to a DFS-approved plan.

Worth noting: Paxos’s settlement totaled $48.5 million, structured as a $26.5 million New York State penalty plus $22 million in forward-looking compliance investment. The underlying NYDFS finding was $1.6 billion in transactions flowing to or from Binance involving illicit actors between 2017 and 2022, including OFAC-sanctioned-entity flows.

NYDFS specified that Paxos “did not have appropriate controls in place to effectively monitor for significant illicit activity occurring at or through Binance” and processed transactions to and from entities after the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned them.

NYDFS’s finding that Paxos failed to “effectively monitor for significant illicit activity occurring at or through Binance” tracked the 2017-2022 review window, indicating the regulator had been examining the Binance flow well before the public action.

The framing in the 2025 press release is striking. NYDFS positions itself as the first regulator globally to take supervisory action against the Binance ecosystem, then notes that “federal and foreign regulators quickly followed in DFS’s footsteps.” The BUSD wind-down, in this telling, was not a stablecoin story at all; it was the visible piece of a broader AML enforcement that the state-level chartering authority initiated.

SEC vs Paxos: The Wells Notice and the July 2024 Drop

The federal track ran in parallel and resolved without enforcement. Paxos received the SEC Wells Notice on February 3, 2023, alleging that “BUSD is a security and that Paxos should have registered the offering of BUSD under the federal securities laws”. Paxos publicly disputed the characterization the same week.

Paxos’s response stated the company “categorically disagrees with the SEC staff because BUSD is not a security under the federal securities laws,” noted that the Wells Notice “pertains only to BUSD,” and confirmed reserves were “always backed 1:1 with US dollar-denominated reserves, fully segregated and held in bankruptcy remote accounts”. Paxos signaled willingness to litigate.

Litigation never came. On July 9, 2024, the SEC sent Paxos a formal termination notice stating it would not recommend enforcement action against Paxos Trust Company in the investigation of Binance USD (BUSD). By that point, BUSD was already a residual token. Binance had completed its in-app conversion six months earlier.

The SEC’s quiet withdrawal mattered for what it did not establish. Without an enforcement action or court ruling, the question of whether USD-collateralized payment stablecoins are securities under federal law remained unanswered through the GENIUS Act drafting period. Paxos’s win-by-default became one input among several that pushed the 2025-2026 federal framework toward treating payment stablecoins as a distinct category rather than as securities.

Common Questions

Is BUSD still redeemable in 2026?

Paxos-issued BUSD on Ethereum remains redeemable for U.S. dollars at par for onboarded customers. Paxos’s redemption guarantee covered onboarded customers “through at least February 2024”, and the company has continued accepting redemptions beyond that window under NYDFS supervision. New users must complete Paxos onboarding and KYC before redeeming. Binance-Peg BUSD on other chains requires a bridge to Ethereum-BUSD before Paxos will honor it.

How much BUSD is left in circulation?

As of May 2026, DefiLlama tracks approximately $37.78 million in Paxos-issued BUSD on Ethereum and approximately $232.81 million in Binance-Peg BUSD across 12 chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, BSC, Polygon, and Base. The combined residual sits at a small fraction of the all-time-high market capitalization. The bulk of the remaining supply is on non-Ethereum chains where the bridge to Paxos has not been unwound.

Conclusion

BUSD is the only major fiat-backed stablecoin to have completed a regulator-supervised orderly wind-down. The peak of $23.5 billion contracted to roughly $37.75 million in Paxos-issued residual supply, leaving holders made whole at par through Paxos’s redemption window. The Paxos settlement documented the AML failures and illicit-transaction flow that drove the original wind-down order.

The lesson sits at the boundary between supervisory authority and product design. A state regulator compelled an orderly stablecoin wind-down without a depeg, the SEC’s parallel investigation closed without a securities ruling, and the GENIUS Act framework inherits Paxos’s win as precedent that payment stablecoins are not securities.