By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 19th, 2024
The growth of BNB and the underlying chain is largely connected with the ongoing regulatory scrutiny, especially in the United States
The BNB Smart Chain (BSC), a leading smart contract blockchain developed by the leading centralized exchange Binance with about $4.45 billion in total value locked, is expected to have a hard fork on its mainnet at block height 29,020,050. Through the current block generation speed, Binance Chain core developers expect the Luban hard fork to take place on June 12, 2023. As a result, the BNB Smart Chain validators and full node operators have been advised to switch their software version to v1.2.4 before the hard fork takes place in seventeen days.
According to GitHub documentation, the Luban hard fork on the BNB Smart Chain is expected to introduce three BEPs. The first is called BEP-126 and is expected to introduce a fast finality mechanism. With BEP-126, the BNB Smart Chain can handle much more complicated transactions much faster without compromising security.
The second one is BEP-174, which is cross-chain-related management.
“This BEP introduces a new governance proposal type to manage the set of whitelisted Relayers…This BEP will improve the management of the relayer whitelist by introducing Relayer Managers, where a Relayer Manager can manage the registration of a single Relayer. Managers will be elected and ejected via governance,” the BSC core developers noted.
The third one is the BEP-221, which introduces a new precompiled contract to validate the CometBFT light blocks.
BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and Market Outlook
The BNB Smart Chain has been developed over the years to compete with other smart contract-oriented blockchains like Ethereum and Tron. According to on-chain data provided by BscScan, the BNB chain had a market capitalization of about $7,413,623,726. Worth noting, the Smart Chain has a total voting power of about 22,447,545 BNB coins.
Moreover, the BNB chain was developed with the goal to embrace large-scale applications – including GameFi, SocialFi, and the metaverse. In this regard, BNB coin is expected to gain value as the underlying chain gets much-needed updates.
According to the latest market data provided by Coingecko and Tradingview, BNB coin traded around $306 on Thursday, up approximately 25 percent YTD. As a result, the BNB market has a market capitalization of about $48,315,168,651, with a circulating supply of 157,900,174 units. Nevertheless, BNB price has dropped approximately 55 percent from its ATH, around $686.
The growth of BNB and the underlying chain is largely connected with the ongoing regulatory scrutiny, especially in the United States. Notably, Binance has been losing significant ground in the United States since the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research late last year.