BNB at $688.65 after the Binance Chain ex-employee scandal
Updated September 13, 2026. · Written by Svetoslav Grigorov
VERIFIED BNB trades at $688.65, per CoinGecko data checked on August 31, 2026 (source). Its market cap sits around $91.72 billion, with roughly $784 million traded over the last 24 hours.
VERIFIED The price is down 1.8% over the last 24 hours and 2.5% over the last seven days, per the same CoinGecko data checked on August 31, 2026.
What's behind the drop
HYPOTHESIS Several market outlets attribute the pressure on the price to a scandal: a former Binance Chain employee allegedly retained unauthorized access to a seed phrase after leaving the company and used it to launch a memecoin called "Asteroid Shiba" (ASTEROID), which weighed on sentiment in mid-August, per cryptonews.net. This is the explanation circulating this week, not a fact independently verified by this site.
HYPOTHESIS The same mid-August coverage pointed to technical factors at that time: profit taking after recent gains, BNB losing its 20-day EMA, then at $578.16, and a resistance zone around $600. Those levels sit well below the $688.65 checked on August 31, so they describe the market when that coverage was written, not the current price.
How it compares with other large cryptocurrencies
VERIFIED BNB's weekly drop (-2.5%) is milder than the one suffered by layer-1 altcoins like Cardano (-12.5% that week) over the same dates, consistent with a common pattern: BNB, backed by exchange Binance itself and its use for fee discounts, tends to move less violently than smaller altcoins during phases of capital rotating out of altcoins.
What this does NOT mean
HYPOTHESIS A moderate weekly drop is not the same as a change in the underlying trend: earlier in August, BNB was rising on the back of VanEck's "VBNB" spot ETF going live, a separate catalyst that coexisted with the same month's volatility. One headline does not cancel out or confirm the other.
Sources checked on August 31, 2026: CoinGecko: BNB Price, cryptonews.net: BNB Price Prediction August 2026.
Educational notice: this article is analysis based on public data, may be wrong, and is not financial advice. It is not a buy or sell recommendation. The decision and the risk are always the reader's own.