Binance launches Ethereum-compatible blockchain to pursue DeFi

Published at: Sept. 1, 2020

After teasing the upcoming blockchain in April, Binance has launched the mainnet of its Smart Chain — a smart contract-enabled blockchain running in parallel to Binance Chain.

Binance Smart Chain comes with an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible environment, which allows Solidity developers to move into the new chain with almost no friction.

The new blockchain will be interoperable with Binance Chain, which will remain live for the foreseeable future. The Binance DEX will likewise remain in its old home.

Binance promises that the blockchain will have cheap transaction fees “as low as 1 cent” and a 3 second block time. The blockchain uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake variant named Proof-of-Staked-Authority. The more BNB is held the more voting power each participant has — which would naturally favor Binance.

Several DeFi projects on Ethereum (like Aave, 1inch, and dForce) are reportedly working on creating new protocols on the chain.

Binance never tried to hide its DeFi ambitions, often pushing for BNB adoption as a collateral asset in non-Ethereum protocols like Equilibrium or Kava. 

Lack of easy interoperability and strong market demand meant that BNB largely remained barred from the main DeFi scene on Ethereum. The launch of Smart Chain appears aimed at the opposite approach — instead of bringing BNB into DeFi, the company seeks to bring DeFi to BNB.

It remains to be seen if the ecosystem will be able to compete with Ethereum’s considerable network effects, despite the promise of a faster blockchain and direct support. In the meantime, Binance began opening itself up to DeFi on its main exchange, listing tokens like DAI, Wrapped BTC and newly released projects like yEarn.

Tags
Technology
Defi
Binance
Smart Contracts
Related Posts
Binance Smart Chain Adds Chainlink Oracles for Better DeFi
Binance Smart Chain — a dual-chain architecture from major crypto exchange Binance — is now integrating Chainlink (LINK) data oracles. Binance Smart Chain adds smart contracts to the exchange's original chain, Binance Chain, and is currently in testnet. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov told Cointelegraph that in his opinion, this integration will save time and effort for developers who are building decentralized apps on the blockchain: “With the Chainlink integration, Binance Smart Chain developers no longer need to dedicate months of engineering time to set up their own oracle infrastructure. Now, they can simply use Chainlink as an abstraction layer to …
Technology / July 23, 2020
The DeFi craze continues as exchanges rush to list popular tokens
OKEx is the latest cryptocurrency exchange to hop on the DeFi bandwagon. On August 28, they announced listings for eight different DeFi tokens, including Band Protocol (BAND), JUST (JST), REN, Reserve Rights (RSR), Yearn.finance (YFI), Nexus Mutual (wNXM), YFII.finance (YFII), and Tellor (TRB). These new listings expand their DeFi suite to a total of 27. OKEx’s CEO, Jay Hao, praised the DeFi sphere, stating: “OKEx has been keenly observing the DeFi market dynamics and trying our best to collaborate with high-quality innovative DeFi projects that show the most potential. We are very encouraged to see so many excellent projects emerging …
Technology / Aug. 28, 2020
Mark Cuban issues burn notice on offensive ENS domain
Someone sent Mark Cuban a profane Ethereum Name Service domain a few days ago. After observant Twitter users recently tracked down his ether address, it was only a matter of time before a wave of unwanted spam transactions made their way into his account. This is, after all, the internet. Here there be monsters. While it isn’t entirely clear what the presumed troll’s endgame was, the word was nonetheless offensive enough to raise some eyebrows at Cointelegraph, and we don’t intend to reprint it here. Suffice to say, a decent person would not want to be known as the owner …
Technology / Feb. 3, 2021
ZenGo Warns of Major Security Flaw Among DApp Wallets
Cryptocurrency wallet provider ZenGo has built a testnet to demonstrate a major security flaw prevalent among decentralized application (DApp) wallets. On March 23, ZenGo published an article highlighting that, when authorizing a specific transaction, many DApp wallets actually grant access over all of that particular token stored in the connected wallet: “As a result, if the DApp is vulnerable to a security issue or is rogue to begin with, attackers can abuse these highly excessive privileges to steal ALL of the DApp’s users holdings (in the approved tokens) without any further user consent. They can do so at any point …
Technology / March 24, 2020
The future of smart contract adoption for enterprises
Decentralized finance (DeFi) markets may have cooled down over the past year, but the technology powering these applications continues to advance. In particular, smart contract platforms that enable transactions to take place across DeFi applications are maturing to meet enterprise requirements. While it’s notable that enterprises have previously shown interest in DeFi use cases, smart contract limitations have hampered adoption. A report published by Grayscale Research in March puts this in perspective, noting that “Despite handling millions of transactions per day, smart contract platforms in their current state would be incapable of handling even 10% of the worlds’ internet traffic.” …
Decentralization / Dec. 3, 2022