BNB Chain: The High Performance Blockchain Platform

GM, GM, everybody! Welcome to what’s going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast where builders show something they're passionate about or have been building in web3. And today, I’m ecstatic to welcome Jimmy, who is a Senior Software Architect at BNB Chain. So if you didn't know, BNB Chain is a blockchain ecosystem that enables developers to build decentralized applications and users to participate in a vibrant web3 environment. So if you stick around for today’s episode, you'll learn all about BNB Chain, how dev-friendly it is, and how to start building. Alright, let’s get into it!

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Jimmy. Happy to have you on.

Hey, hey Narb. Nice to meet you. I'm very glad and excited to be here.

Yeah, likewise. I'm ecstatic to have you on. I guess before we get into all the great goodies you have planned for us, perhaps you would like to do a brief introduction about yourself?

Yeah, sure. I'm Jimmy. I'm from the BNB Chain tech team. My focus is on the infrastructure and also the ecosystem of the development of the BNB Chain. So we hope to align our BNB Chain vision to make the BNB Chain as an open and permissionless ecosystem for all the developers.

Awesome. And how long have you been with BNB Chain?

Actually, I have joined this team two years ago. It was my first web3 job, I mean the first web3 full-time job. So I'm very excited about the industry and also the latest development of the blockchain technology. Before I joined web3, I used to be a full-time full-stack developer across different industries. So I'm very happy to be connected with the web3 developer community.

Yeah, man, for sure. Web3 is such an awesome little community. I know it's small, but there are some really interesting people out there. I'm just curious, what brought you into the web3 industry? What gravitated you to go from web2 to web3?

Yeah, that's a great question because I'm very optimistic about decentralization. About three years ago, I noticed that there are a lot of discussions about data ownership, especially with web2 companies like Google or Amazon. They have a lot of control of people's ownership of data, and privacy could be another big challenge for the whole internet. So through blockchain technology and also privacy protection technology, it could allow people to own their own data. That could be an amazing idea and also have the potential to change the governance of our society. So that's why I joined the web3 world to explore different solutions to help people build and make a change.

Awesome. Excellent answer. Yeah, and I'm sure that a lot of folks in the web3 space also share the same sentiment. So what do you have planned for us today?

Yeah, I just want to share the latest development of the BNB Chain from the technical perspective. This is for the technical persons and also for the developers. I want to share the latest upgrade and also what we can bring to the developers and to the ecosystem. Today I will introduce two concepts. One is PBS, which is aligned with the Proposer-Builder Separation architecture, aligned with Ethereum as well. Another topic is BC Fusion, an initiative we started earlier this year to merge the BNB Beacon Chain with the BNB Smart Chain for a streamlined user and developer experience.

Excellent. Yeah, I know you're kind of strapped for time, so let's get right into the content here. I'll bring up your slides and let's get going.

Sure. Okay, cool. So before I dive into the detail, I'd like to share our vision of the BNB Chain. It's very straightforward: we want to build an infrastructure that is a public good, open and scalable for everyone to build on. And of course, our vision is to onboard the next billion web3 users because the users are still a minority at this moment but expanding very fast. We want to help the community and the ecosystem to build and onboard the next billion users.

And before I dive into the tech details, I just want to share what the ecosystem looks like. We call it One BNB because we have multiple chains, not only one. Right now we have the BNB Smart Chain, which is our DeFi hub, and also opBNB, which is a Layer 2 rollup network on top of BSC. We also have the decentralized data storage network to provide the storage layer for DApps. At the same time, AvengerDAO is our community to help protect users from hacking and spamming. This is the overview to give you a high-level understanding of what the BNB Chain ecosystem looks like.

Here is the basic data of the BNB Chain. You can see here, aligned with mass adoption, we want to keep the blockchain technology as affordable or as cheap as possible and also introduce performance optimization. You can see here opBNB, our Layer 2, is the lowest among all the Layer 2s you can find on the market. At the same time, our optimizations on the Ethereum Virtual Machine have allowed us to have a TPS around 5,000 to 10,000 on opBNB and 5,000 on BSC, which is very fast. From the security perspective, you can also see a great reduction in losses in 2023. I hope this year we will have better security levels for the BNB Chain ecosystem.

So I just mentioned I want to cover two topics. One is the BNB Chain Fusion, which you can see here as part of our 2024 outlook, and also the PBS. PBS actually is part of increased decentralization and also improving the security of the network. It's aligned with our outlook.

So here is the overall BC Fusion. Let me introduce what the BC Fusion is. The BC Fusion actually aims to streamline the network because we believe the Beacon Chain and all the governance of the BSC can be merged natively. So we can streamline the network and improve efficiency and reduce security risks. It is ongoing. We are already in the middle of the BC Fusion. Later this month on July 14th, we are going to have another hard fork we call Sunset Second Sunset Hard Fork to disable some staking functions and governance functions on the Beacon Chain. So if you are a BNB holder or staker, you have to migrate your assets as soon as possible. After the Second Sunset Hard Fork, we will discontinue the Beacon Chain eventually in the middle of August.

Yeah, this is the BC Fusion. So I just want to have a call for action because I know some stakers are still on the Beacon Chain. If you have your delegations or stakings, you have to migrate as soon as possible. After you migrate, you can enjoy better APY or rewards, I mean the staking rewards, and also help secure the network because after you migrate, all the governance and everything will be on the BSC natively. At the same time, after the BC Fusion, we also will enable our new governance architecture so that every BNB staker can participate in the governance process. It will be shared later this month. You will have a new voting process and staking process to help secure the network and shape the future of the BNB Chain.

So let's talk about the BSC Proposer-Builder Separation. If you are familiar with Ethereum, it is very similar. We believe the block builder and validator (proposer) should be separated because if you do not separate them, usually the MEV marketplace will be more opaque. We want to have a more fair and transparent block space marketplace. This is a very good solution proposed by Ethereum, so we believe it is also very helpful for the BSC. That's the reason why we introduced Proposer-Builder Separation in the BSC as well.

So this is a high-level architecture of what the BSC and MEV solution looks like. The builder is going to bundle the transaction. If you are familiar with the current architecture, as a user, if you send transactions, they usually go to the public mempool. That means arbitrage traders or attackers can find your transactions and use that as a chance to have some sandwich attack or do some arbitrage, etc. The builder will provide a private mempool, so people can send transactions to the builder. The builder will bundle the transactions with other transactions into a bundle and then into an unsealed block bid to the proposer. The proposer here is the validator itself, so the validator will pick up the most profitable blocks and seal the blocks onto the chain. The sealed block will be submitted to the network and validated and then go to the public network.

Here is a detailed diagram to explain how it works, but I won't go into very detailed. I just want to mention that every builder can submit a bid to the validators, and the validators will pick up the most profitable bid. And of course, the builder can be integrated with more than one validator, meaning they can send a bid to multiple validators and validators can also receive bids from multiple builders. It could be an open marketplace. Different from the previous design, in this open marketplace, the builders and validators are more transparent or more fair for the block space. So it can reduce the abusing of MEV. That's very important for the users because if the market is not transparent, users can be attacked easily. And also important for the ecosystem because every player in this ecosystem can benefit from it. The builders can get some rewards and also the validators. That means the staking rewards on the BNB Chain ecosystem can increase. More people are willing to run their own validators on the BSC and increase the decentralization of the BNB Smart Chain.

Here I give you a very high-level diagram of how it is going. You can see right now we already have 19 builders running online and over 70% of the blocks are actually being built by the builders. You can see every builder has their own data and the trend. It's very transparent.

This is another thing I want to highlight. Based on this kind of architecture, because the builder can send the unsealed blocks to the proposer, they can also work as a paymaster. The paymaster, if you're familiar with the way how people send transactions, can sponsor their users. If you are a DApp developer, you can use the paymaster to sponsor your users so your users do not have to pay the gas fee by themselves. For the new users from the web2 world, most people are not familiar with what gas is and why I need a native token to pay the gas to send transactions. These complexities can scare away a lot of newbies. So the paymaster is very helpful for the DApps to onboard new users. Another thing I want to mention is that this is the EOA gasless solution, which means the external account wallet. It is different from another concept called account abstraction. There are two different accounts. The account abstraction is a smart contract account, which means it's a little bit different from the EOA. The smart contract account has some compatibility issues, not all the DApps support the smart contract wallet. But for the EOA wallet, all the smart contracts can work with it. That's the reason why we also introduced this kind of services for the DApp developers to choose to either use the smart contract wallet or stick with EOA accounts. It depends on different business models and user use cases.

Yeah, this is a very high-level comparison between the EIP-4337, which is the account abstraction standard, and also the EOA paymaster. I just mentioned there are some compatibility issues of EIP-4337. It is very minor but has some possibility. Another thing you may want to pay attention to is that it is trustless, but our EOA paymaster solution actually, you have to trust the paymaster in some case. The cost is also different, the EOA paymaster is lower. Of course on Layer 2, the gas price is very low already, so it's not a big problem but there is a minor difference as well.

Yeah, during the BC Fusion, we also introduced the BNB Chain governance into the BNB Smart Chain, I mean the new governance procedures and mechanism. This could be explained in our documents. Of course, you have to stake the BNB token to the validators first and then you can get the voting power to participate in this kind of voting process. I hope that makes sense because I know it's very detailed.

Yeah, definitely. I guess the governance here, what kinds of things can people vote on? Is it just strictly how the BNB protocol can evolve over time, or is there also like DAO voting as well?

Yeah, it's also like a DAO voting, not only for the technical discussions. Of course, the first kind of discussion will go to the BEP. Let me maybe I can show what the BEP looks like. Let me change my... just give me a sec. Yeah, this is our BEP GitHub repo. BEP stands for BNB Evolution Proposals. So you can see all the historical BEP that have been discussed are listed here. Of course, the next BEP we want to vote and discuss with the community is the BEP-341, which is to allow the validators to produce consecutive blocks. The target is very straightforward, we want to increase the capability or throughput of the network. There are some tradeoffs. For example, it can increase the risk of MEV abusing, so we have some settings for this kind of risks and also to avoid block avoidance. This kind of things can be discussed and tradeoff. We want to increase the transparency and also involve some of the discussions. If you are familiar with the core chain development or the protocol itself, you can also participate in our discussions here. Your comments or your ideas are very welcome so that we can have a better solution.

So this is one type of the discussion and voting through our governance. Another type of the governance is that you just mentioned about the DAO. We can also have other type of the discussions, for example, whether we want to introduce the EIP-1559 into the BNB Smart Chain or any other kind of the discussions are possible. We want to allow the BNB holders or BNB stakers to participate about, you know, the reshape of the BNB's future.

Awesome. And anybody can make these proposals, or do they have to be part of the BNB Chain team?

Yeah, anybody with the BNB stakings can create a proposal. Of course, you can just create a pull request and put it here because it is open source. So the community is going to review it and share the comments and also share the ideas. Maybe your new idea could be very innovative and very helpful for the ecosystem.

Awesome. And I guess taking a step back and looking at BNB Chain as a whole, I know in the beginning you mentioned that it was made up of three components: the BNB Chain itself, I think a Layer 2 and a storage layer. What was the decision-making behind that to have everything in-house? Typically you see protocols either just staying a Layer 1, or another protocol being a Layer 2, or another protocol just doing storage. What compelled Binance to make everything in one place?

Yeah, that's a very good question. I just want to highlight that the BNB Chain is not part of Binance, it's a separate entity. Right now it's totally separated and BNB Chain focuses on the infrastructure part. To answer your question, let me show you one diagram. Can you see that? The reason why we want to have everyone under the One BNB Chain paradigm is that we believe develop a new DApp is very difficult, especially if you want to develop a fully on-chain decentralized application. It's because all the dev stack are separated and fragmented. We want to have a streamlined DApp dev stack. From the web2 developers, you are familiar with the three layer of applications: the front-end, the business logic layer, and also the back-end which is storage. For the DApp, it is very similar. Besides the business logic and storage being decentralized and saved on the blockchain. We want to make the whole ecosystem easy to use to increase the developer experiences. So you can see in this diagram, the Greenfield can be used as two layer. One is the web hosting, which means the front-end can also be hosted by the Greenfield. Also we can build a decentralized database like the Glacier. So these kind of things can be fully on-chain. We also provide data processing and cross-chain programmability so after you upload your file to the Greenfield as an object, the object can be mirrored back to the Layer 1 or Layer 2 as an NFT. The NFT can be transferred to another person. This kind of logic can be automatic. So this cross-chain programmability can provide more flexibility to the DApp developers to build their own solutions. That's the reason why we want to build everything under the One BNB paradigm.

Yeah, this looks really, really amazing. From a developer perspective, what I just saw is pretty much a full-stack development platform where I can get everything that I want in one place, which is pretty sweet. I would ask how, I guess for people who are watching us today and want to start building on BNB Chain after seeing that diagram, how do you recommend they start? Where should they begin? What's the Hello World of BNB Chain?

Yeah, we do have a Hello World or tutorial section on our doc site. If you are a web2 developer, I think it's very straightforward and easy to follow. You can just start building a very simple fully on-chain DApp to get familiar with how the DApp is different from the traditional web2 applications and understand the background logic. To make your hands dirty, this is very important for the developer. You can get yourself familiar with different components of the BNB Chain and then it will depend on your imagination what kind of the logic or what kind of the problems you want to solve by your tech stack.

Well said, well said. And I know we're approaching time here, but if people start building and they need support, what's the best way for them to get that support?

We do have the Discord channel. We do have the technical support team to help you if you have any problems. You can also follow our Twitter account to follow our latest updates so that you can always get the latest information.

Great, awesome. And finally, is BNB Chain going to be at EthCC? What can people expect?

Yeah, I will be there, introducing our latest development as well at EthCC.

Awesome. Excellent. Yeah, I guess with that, we can call it, but Jimmy thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know you're very busy, you have a very busy schedule lined up for you, but really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show today.

Yeah, thank you. I just put the Discord channel in our chat so you can share that information for the developers as well.

Certainly. Yeah, and folks I'll have that posted in the YouTube description so you can follow up with that after the fact. But yeah, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. Enjoy EthCC if you're going, and yeah, definitely we will catch you back here next week for a couple of other DevNTell sessions. All righty!

Yeah, thank you. Thank you Narb. It's my pleasure to be here.

Likewise. Thank you very much. Cheers!

Thank you. Cheers. Bye.