Blockchain
- BNB Chain is one of the most active blockchains in the industry.
- BNB Chain’s Director of Ecosystem Growth, Zoe Wei, told DailyCoin that BNB Chain is looking at optimistic rollups without knowledge as scaling solutions.
- She also revealed the opBNB launch window.
Binance, the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in the world, has a plethora of different products and services aimed at different user groups.
One of the most widely used products is BNB Chain, one of the most widely used blockchains in the industry. As of April, there were an average of over one million daily active users using BNB Chain for various things, including transactions, trading, gaming, and other activities.
However, the minds behind BNB Chain say that one million daily active users is not enough. And to increase the number exponentially, BNB needs to make transactions on the blockchain cheaper and faster.
BNB Chain Scaling Solutions
Despite being one of the most consistently used blockchains in the world, BNB Chain is not stopping. The development team behind the project is working to make the blockchain even more accessible than it is today.
Zoe Wei, Director of Ecosystem Growth at BNB Chain, spoke with Stefan Trapp, section editor of DailyCoin at Next Block Expo in Warsaw, Poland, which is actively developing Binance’s blockchain Layer-2 scaling solutions.
According to Wei, not only are there cheaper blockchains, but Web2 systems are still faster than BNB Chain and most other alternative Layer-1s.
“The main reason we are looking at different scaling solutions for BNB Chain is that we are not the cheapest blockchain. We also want to be much faster because web2 systems are still faster than us. That’s why all L1s, including BNB Chain, need scaling solutions.”
Wei emphasized that BNB Chain mainly looks at optimistic and zero-knowledge-based rollups, just like the Ethereum community.
Optimistic and ZK rollups to scale the BNB chain
BNB Chain has already made significant progress in developing its own scaling solutions.
One example Wei pointed to was zkBNB, a scaling tool built on a zero-knowledge architecture that bundles thousands of transactions and executes them off-chain before sending proof to the underlying layer that the transactions were executed correctly. This dramatically reduces transaction costs and increases throughput to thousands of transactions per second.
Wei stressed that zkBNB is currently in the testnet phase and is expected to hit the mainnet “very soon”.
“We launched zkBNB on testnet last year and have been testing it for a while. It is expected that zkBNB will greatly help specific ecosystem projects such as GameFi to scale up. We will be launching zkBNB on the mainnet very soon.”
BNB Chain has also looked at optimistic rollups. Along with the launch of EIP-4844 on Ethereum, otherwise known as Protothansharding, upbeat rollups like opBNB are expected to process over 20,000 transactions per second, at least in theory.
Wei also revealed that opBNB will use the BNB token.
“opBNB will ensure that our speed is even higher and the rates are lower. Both scaling tools will use BNB as their currency, reflecting our goal to promote BNB across different BNB ecosystems to make sure our speed is even higher and lower rates.”
Wei added that opBNB is expected to be released in “Q3 of this year.”
Security at the front
BNB Chain is one of the most actively used blockchains in the world, so the presence of scams and carpet pullers is no surprise.
When Stefan asked how BNB Chain is handling the tricky situation, Wei revealed that BNB Chain invests heavily in user security and highlighted AvengerDAO as an exemplary community-led initiative that helps address bad behavior.
“BNB Chain is an open platform and we cannot prevent people from deploying their projects. To make sure that carpet pullers and scams on BNB Chain are dealt with, we have a community led security project called AvengerDAO. The project scans all suspicious transactions on BNB Chain and reminds users to be careful. We think this helps users avoid projects that are likely to be scams and promote only the good projects on BNB Chain.”
Stefan asked about BNB Chain’s groundbreaking Planck upgrade, which went live in April. The upgrade included security changes to BEP-171, including a timer lock on large cross-chain transactions.
According to Wei, Planck has made the “free flow assets across various chains” safer.
“Planck’s hard fork facilitates the free flow of assets between different chains and safely maximizes the utility of different assets. Cross-chain is where a lot of hacks happen, so it was super important to implement BEP-171 to make sure it’s as secure as possible.”
Wei added that the next security proposals always depend on the wishes of the community. BEP-171 was also a “community-led proposal,” she said.
On the other hand
- zkBNB was scheduled for Q1 of 2023. However, the project is still in testnet. It is unclear when zkBNB will launch.
Why this matters
Scaling BNB Chain to cheaply process thousands of transactions per second would open many doors in terms of adoption.
