By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 17th, 2024
The BNB Beacon Chain, formerly Binance Chain, and BNB Smart Chain, formerly BSC, will now make up the BNB Chain.
Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies has announced that it has rebranded the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the blockchain powering its platform to BNB Chain, an abbreviation for Build and Build.
According to the press release, the major relaunch of Binance’s layer 1 or base blockchain is part of a bid to establish a connection to Binance’s BNB token, the governance token for the protocol, to expand its protocol and build on decentralization.
The BNB Beacon Chain, formerly Binance Chain, and BNB Smart Chain, formerly BSC, will now make up the BNB Chain. BSC is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is used to execute smart contracts and serves as a gateway to other blockchains.
Alongside BSC’s name change also comes a plethora of advancements that will benefit users, projects, and developers connected to the BNB Chain community. BNB Chain will embrace large-scale applications, including GameFi, SocialFi, and the Metaverse.
Users can now enjoy Scaling from one chain to multi-chain, Boosting the throughput of BSC, Introducing on-chain governance mechanisms, and Improving scaling solutions and an expansion of the validator set of BSC from 21 to 41 (with 20 validators functioning as candidate block producers).
Samy Karim, BNB Chain ecosystem coordinator, in the press release revealed that the 20 additional validators will function as candidate block producers. Karim speaking to reporters stated that the team behind the exchange’s blockchain didn’t consider its Binance branding when it was launched 18 months ago as it was then just an experiment.
“When we started, we definitely didn’t expect BSC, now the BNB chain, to grow to where it is today,” Karim stated adding that “this shows the level of underserved demand there really was, and this type of infrastructure really helped to drive massive new user growth in decentralized applications that wasn’t really happening before.”
The BNB Chain will however remain a community-driven, open-source, and decentralized ecosystem. The BNB Chain community will also aim to develop the infrastructure that runs the world’s parallel virtual economy using the MetaFi concept (“Meta” for metadata and “Fi” for DeFi).
“People always think of Binance Smart Chain, because it carries the Binance word, as something owned by Binance,” Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance stated. “We’ve done a lot of work to decentralize it, and we also realize BNB is beyond Binance. It’s bigger than Binance. BNB is its own living, breathing ecosystem with the BNB Chain,” he added.
Binance has now invested more than a billion dollars to provide support to the BSC ecosystem as its competition with the Ethereum network and other layers 1 blockchain continues to intensify. BSC, over the years, has been chastised for being overly centralized and for the ecosystem’s rug pulling.
Changpeng Zhao, speaking to the press in 2020 revealed that the company had to sacrifice some decentralization to compete with Ethereum when it was designing BSC.