BNB was launched through an initial coin offering in 2017, 11 days before the Binance cryptocurrency exchange launched. It was originally issued as an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum network, with a total supply capped at 200 million coins, and 100 million BNBs offered in the ICO. However, the ERC-20 BNB coins were swapped with BEP2 BNB on a 1:1 ratio in April 2019 with the launch of the Binance Chain mainnet, and are now no longer hosted on Ethereum. The Binance Blockchain uses the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism instead of mining.