How To Use BNB Chain in 2022

a year ago

The Binance Smart Chain was recently rebranded to the BNB Chain in an effort to emphasize on the “Build and Build” narrative that Binance has been trying to push forward. It was also aimed at moving users away from viewing Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as a centralized (or less decentralized) layer-1 (L1) chain because of the number of validators that participate in network transactions.

The new BNB Chain will comprise of two components: Binance Chain will be rebranded to BNB Beacon Chain, and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) will now be known as BNB Smart Chain. The number of validators will also increase from 21 to 41.

Under the larger BNB chain name, Binance is committing $1 billion to help build and expand the ecosystem of decentralized applications (DApps), as it competes with Ethereum and other L1s. In this guide, we will be exploring some functionalities of the BNB chain and understand the different ways we can use it.

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Understanding the BNB Chain

The BNB chain is a combined name that is given to the previous chains, BSC and Binance Chain. The former is now known as BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and the latter as BNB Beacon Chain. The objective is to make the name of the chain easily relatable to the native cryptocurrency on Binance, BNB. This also helps remove the attention from the chains individually, as the problem of centralization on Binance Smart Chain still exists. That aside, the BNB token is a governance token used to participate in governance decisions on BSC.

Leading up to the rebranding of the two chains as BNB chains were the significant

BEP95 upgrade, which introduced an auto-burn mechanism to BNB. This helped make BNB a deflationary asset, absent a mining algorithm that issues new tokens.

Understanding the BNB Beacon Chain

Remember that the BNB Beacon Chain is now responsible for all governance related activities on the BNB chain and also helps in staking. It is also used as the primary chain for making exchanges across the ecosystem. With the Beacon Chain, you can send/receive your BNB tokens, make changes to the chain by submitting governance proposals, and also issue new tokens. In addition to this, you can share proposals for creating new pairs of assets for trading and even create buy/sell orders on some trading pairs using the SDK.

In addition to this, you can retrieve on-chain data and even run your own node to participate in network activity.

Understanding the BNB Smart Chain

The BNB Smart Chain is the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) from before. It’s primary objective, when launched, was to introduce smart contract functionality to the Binance ecosystem and also make it EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible. Compatibility with the EVM ensures that developers are able to port over their applications on Ethereum to Binance and easily provide a seamless experience to the users here at lower transaction costs (remember that BNB Smart Chain is cheaper to use than Ethereum). This compatibility is why you are able to easily configure your MetaMask wallet for BNB Smart Chain and use the funds on the chain to access various DeFi applications on EVM and BNB Smart Chain.

With this chain, you do almost all the things that you can do with the BNB chain. The added advantage of EVM compatibility implies that you can easily have your Ethereum applications ported over to Binance.

Now that we have covered the basics about the BNB chain, let’s get down to understanding how we can a) access the two chains and b) understand how we can use them for various applications.

Under the larger BNB brand, Binance also aims to take a step forward towards decentralization as it hopes to increase the validator set from 21 validators to 41 validators. They are also aiming to launch more on-chain governance mechanisms and take a deep dive into building more applications and furthering the Binance DeFi ecosystem. But one of the most crucial changes that they aim to bring with this change is that of MetaFi — metaverse and DeFi. But what is it? Let’s understand.

Binance’s Push for MetaFi

In a nutshell, MetaFi is a narrative that aims to push for standardized blockchain infrastructure for varied applications across DeFi. It is a combination of metaverse and DeFi and with this narrative, Binance hopes to establish itself as the leading protocol that helps support a variety of metaverse, DeFi and even non-fungible token (NFT) projects. As you can imagine, if a single protocol is able to give the opportunity for several developers to build on its own ecosystem, then all these DeFi applications can seamlessly integrate with each other and provide for an all-encompassing experience to their users.

While the narrative is not new, the packaging of the narrative and the way Binance aims to push it forward certainly is. This is putting the BNB chain in an entirely new light making it seem like the protocol that can help support hundreds (if not thousands) of different DeFi applications. In the article where Binance explained what MetaFi means — an umbrella term for projects encompassing the metaverse, GameFi, SocialFi, Web 3.0 and NFTs.

What Upgrades Do the BNB Chain Bring Over BSC?

We must remember that the BNB chain now comprises both the Binance Smart Chain and the Binance Chain. One of the key upgrades is scalability — BNB Chain is the first blockchain to introduce a considerable block size with a 100m gas ceiling. However, as the block space increases, it also becomes incumbent on the validators to acquire specialized hardware to be able to sync the entire chain consistently. To help avoid the added overheads of specialized hardware and to make network participation a smoother process, Binance is working on introducing Erigon that will help decrease both time and storage overheads on validating nodes.

Next, to support BNB Chain’s vision of MetaFi and onboard the next billion users to crypto, it needs more than one chain. Hence, it aims to support partition chains and transition into a multi-chain ecosystem, where cross-shard and cross-chain elements will be key. This will be achieved by implementing new technologies using the BNB Chain Application Side Chain (BAS) and BNB Chain Partition Chain (BPC) infrastructure layers.

Finally, the BNB Chain Core Team aims to grow the community, develop a native crypto talent pool and expand open-source technology. Events like the BNB Chain 2022 Hackathon and BNB Chain 2022 Summit, part of the $1 billion funding and talent development are on the roadmap.

How Can I Use the BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain?

To access both the chains, you need to have a wallet that will help facilitate transfers between different accounts and even dApps on the BNB Smart Chain. If you need to use the BNB Beacon Chain, then you can access the web wallet here. You can use this wallet for generating crypto keys, addresses and checking your balances across different trading positions.

For BSC, you can simply access it using your MetaMask wallet. It is fairly easy to add BSC as a network to your MetaMask wallet — you can refer to a guide to do so here. Once you have integrated it, you can easily make BNB transfers across different wallets and even use it to stake your tokens within the network to start earning staking rewards.

What Is the BNB token?

BNB token is the native cryptocurrency of Binance and it is used to participate in various governance decisions on the platform. When launched, it was based on the Ethereum network but since then has been swapped with the BEP-2 type token on the Binance network. To further facilitate a seamless experience across both the Binance Chain and the Binance Smart Chain, a new token type (BEP-20) was created. This means that the token can now be accessed on all chains: as BEP-2 on Binance Chain, as BEP-20 on Binance Smart Chain and as ERC-20 on Ethereum.

But remember that if you want to use any dApps on Binance, then you will have to use the BEP-20 tokens. Because the two token standards here, BEP-2 and BEP-20 are not the same, if you transfer some of your BEP-2 tokens from your BNB Beacon Chain to your BSC, then the tokens will not be credited.

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