BNB Sets a Record as Solana Holds Fifth in Market-Cap Race

CoinMarketCap’s historical snapshot for September 13, 2025 placed Solana fifth among crypto assets by circulating market capitalization, one position ahead of BNB, even as BNB set a fresh intraday price record. The juxtaposition captured a close contest between two large smart-contract ecosystems: SOL had the larger measured asset value in the daily snapshot, while BNB was still making its own price high.

CoinMarketCap recorded SOL at $242.60, with 542,444,833 SOL in circulating supply and a market capitalization of $131,594,897,385.54. It recorded BNB at $933.90, with 139,187,088 BNB circulating and a market capitalization of $129,986,772,940.68. On those published figures, Solana’s lead was $1,608,124,444.86, or about 1.24% of BNB’s market capitalization. That percentage is Coinburn’s calculation from the two snapshot values, not a figure reported by CoinMarketCap.

Two records, two measurement windows

The ranking was not produced by SOL’s September 13 daily move alone. CoinMarketCap’s trailing windows showed SOL up 0.12% over 24 hours and 21.15% over seven days. BNB was up 0.96% over 24 hours and 8.37% over seven days. SOL therefore led BNB by 12.78 percentage points over the published seven-day window, another Coinburn calculation. The same source’s September 12 snapshot had already placed SOL fifth and BNB sixth, so September 13 should be described as confirmation of the ordering, not necessarily the first instant at which the crossover occurred.

BNB nevertheless marked the date with a price milestone. A contemporaneous Bitcoin.com market report said BNB reached $942 on September 13, while a same-date Odaily market bulletin reported that BNB moved above 940 USDT and was quoted at 938.72 USDT when that bulletin was written. Those records establish a new high in the contemporaneous reporting, but they do not identify an identical venue, timestamp or consolidated methodology. The defensible claim is that BNB traded above 940 USDT during the date; $942 is the Bitcoin.com observation, not a universal close.

Why the ranking mattered

Market capitalization is price multiplied by circulating supply, so rank can change because of price, supply estimates or both. It is not a direct measure of revenue, application usage, decentralization, liquidity or economic security. Even so, the September 13 ordering mattered as a compact market signal: traders were assigning roughly comparable aggregate values to the native assets of Solana and BNB Chain, and a difference of about $1.61 billion was small relative to either asset’s roughly $130 billion capitalization.

The broader tape was also firm. CoinMarketCap’s snapshot put bitcoin at $115,950.51, up 5.19% over its trailing seven-day window, and ether at $4,668.18, up 9.22%. Bitcoin.com estimated the crypto market at just under $4.17 trillion for the week ending September 13. That estimate came from a different provider and should not be mixed mechanically with CoinMarketCap’s asset-level snapshot.

What the data cannot prove

The evidence supports a date-specific ranking and a venue-dependent BNB record, not a claim that one blockchain had permanently displaced another. Crypto prices trade continuously, providers aggregate exchanges differently, and circulating-supply estimates can vary. Without raw venue-level trades and a disclosed snapshot cutoff, the precise moment and duration of Solana’s lead cannot be reconstructed from the surviving daily pages. The September 13 record is therefore best read as a verified market snapshot, not a permanent hierarchy or an explanation of investor motives.