CEA Industries Expands BNB Holdings to $330M

The CEA industries (NASDAQ) has made another move in its radical shift towards crypto. On Sept 3, 2025, the company bought more 38,888 BNB with a cost of 33 million BNB. This would include CEA executing a August 2025 $500 million private placement led by 10X Capital and YZi Labs (the latter is run by Binance’s former CEO Changpeng Zhao). The investment delivered the company a war chest to reform itself as a corporate crypto treasury operator, not a consumer goods maker.

Strategic Goal: 1% of BNB Supply

CEA’s long-term goal is to control 1 percent of the circulating supply of BNB by 2025. Given that there are around 140 million tokens in circulation in BNB, 1 percent would be around 1.4 million BNB. That would imply an investment of 1.19 Billion (at current market prices) . Meaning that the CEA would still need to buy over 1 million new tokens.

The aspiration is an evidence of the growing faith in BNB in the control of the ecosystem. BNB also powers BNB Chain, which enables more than 12 billion USD worth of monthly DeFi trading volume across decentralized trading, yield farming, and tokenized assets.

Why BNB? Deflationary Supply and Ecosystem Strength.

Today BNB is the 5th largest crypto in terms of market cap, worth more than 118 billion. It is deflationary unlike most altcoins: Binance burns (destroys) 20% of profits per quarter by repurchasing and permanently retiring BNB. Over 50 million BNB have been burnt since 2017, or approximately 25 percent of its supply, improving scarcity and helping to drive price momentum upwards.

In addition to deflation, BNB is also useful in a very broad sense:

• Reduced transaction rates on BNB Chain (only about $0.10 per transaction on average, as compared to Ethereum at 5-10).
• On-chain protocol governance rights.
• Use in DeFi applications (DEXes, lending, staking).
• This combination of scarcity and utility renders BNB appealing as a corporate treasury investor, which is what MicroStrategy does to Bitcoin.

Market Reactions and Risks

Unfortunately the CEA has been on reckless rampage, and now they are catching up with them. While institutional investors like 10X Capital and Zhao’s own YZi Labs publicly back the strategy, traditional markets are wary. Shares of VAPE (CEA) fell slightly (-1.09) since the news cannot be too good that the company has randomly turned to a relatively unstable digital asset. The about-face of CEA is akin to prior MicroStrategy playbooks which gathered 252,612 BTC and Tesla that acquired Bitcoinback in 2021. That being said, CEA has also purchased an altcoin instead of Bitcoin or Ethereum – evidence of diversified corporate crypto holdings.