A long-term cryptocurrency investor turned $1,000 into $1 million, underscoring the payoff from patient holding strategies of digital assets.
The “diamond hand” cryptocurrency holder turned their original $1,000 BNB (BNB) investment into over $1 million, marking a 1,000-fold return in eight years.
The investor acquired their stash for just $1,000 when the Binance ecosystem’s native token traded for around $1 back in 2017, according to blockchain data platform Lookonchain.
Despite the 1,000-fold return, the trader continues holding the BNB tokens instead of taking profits, according to data from blockchain intelligence platform Nansen.
The near $1 million profit comes as the BNB token rose to a new all-time high of $1,005 on Tuesday, according to Cointelegraph data, signaling growing investor expectations of a forthcoming altcoin season.
Three weeks ago, Raoul Pal, founder and CEO of Global Macro Investor, predicted that the crypto market is in the “waiting room” ahead of the next phase of the price discovery stage, which may extend the market cycle top to the first or second quarter of 2026.
“Our work suggests (probabilistically speaking) that the cycle extends into Q1 2026 and possibly Q2 2026 due to slow business cycle forcing more liquidity for longer,” he said in an Aug. 29 X post.
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BNB all-time high driven by native utility
A combination of growth factors contributed to BNB’s new all-time high above $1,000, including the token’s native “utility,” according to Marwan Kawadri, DeFi lead and head of EMEA at BNB Chain.
BNB is a “unique” network token with increasing utility in centralized exchanges, seeing more demand from institutional investors due to the “growing momentum of DATs coming in with a focus on high-quality assets like BNB,” Kawadri told Cointelegraph.
“[BNB] continues to see strong growth momentum: more developers, more protocols, more capital, more users.”
This creates a “flywheel for the network and native token,” he added.
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“Watching #BNB go from $0.10 ICO price 8 years ago to today’s $1000 is something words cannot explain,” said Binance co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao in a Thursday X post.
“We had our challenges along the way, but we worked hard, we built, and we held,” he added.
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