Publicly traded companies might have a new favorite cryptocurrency to dump billions of dollars into, in the hopes of sending their stock prices soaring—and it’s not Bitcoin, or even Ethereum. It’s BNB.

On Tuesday, Nano Labs, a publicly traded blockchain infrastructure provider in China, announced a near-term plan to purchase $1 billion worth of BNB. The company plans to store the immense trove of tokens in a corporate treasury, and said today that it eventually intends to hold between 5% and 10% of BNB’s total circulating supply—a staggering sum worth between $4.7 billion and $9.4 billion at writing. 

Upon news of the investment plan this morning, Nano’s stock nearly tripled in value instantly, surging from $10.89 to $29.18 within minutes of the market’s opening. The stock then settled to $14.85 by closing bell—still up a whopping 64.8% on the day. 

Nano said that for the first phase of its BNB treasury play, it will acquire $500 million worth of the cryptocurrency. The funds for that purchase will come from a sale of convertible promissory notes that “several investors have agreed to subscribe for,” the company said. Those notes, after a period of 360 days, will then be convertible into Class A shares of Nano stock, with an initial conversion price of $20 a share. 

In recent months, publicly traded companies have begun investing billions of dollars in Bitcoin treasuries that have—so far—offered them lucrative and reportable passive revenue. 

The trend, however, has spooked some analysts, who warn that if (and likely when) Bitcoin’s price drops past certain thresholds, these companies will have to pay back the cheap money they borrowed to buy up the tokens, potentially triggering a broad market-wide sell-off and a massive crypto crash.

Now, it would appear, the tantalizing allure of easy Bitcoin profits in traditional finance has spread to other assets even less established than the world’s top cryptocurrency. We’ve seen Solana, XRP, and Ethereum treasury plays pop up in recent months, and now BNB is getting a spotlight as well.

BNB is the native token of Binance, the world’s largest centralized crypto exchange. It is regularly used to settle transactions on the platform, and is the fifth-largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, with a current value of $93.9 billion.

Appetite for investing heavily in BNB appears to be growing on Wall Street. A separate group of crypto hedge fund executives is currently planning to raise $100 million to acquire a stash of the token, according to a Monday report in Bloomberg. 

Representatives from Nano Labs did not immediately respond when asked by Decrypt to comment on why they chose BNB, among other top cryptocurrencies, as the sole asset to seed their planned multi-billion dollar treasury with. The representatives also did not respond when asked whether the purchase was coordinated with Binance. 

On Tuesday, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao—who was forced to resign as the exchange’s CEO in 2023, after pleading guilty to criminal money laundering charges—celebrated Nano Labs’ BNB treasury announcement, and particularly, the impact the news had on the company’s stock. 

“Their stock price went through the roof,” Zhao said. “Not financial advice!”

Edited by Andrew Hayward