BEP(Idea) Proposal for BNB Chain Fusion

BEP
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Proposal for BNB Chain Fusion

BNB Beacon Chain is part of the genesis of the BNB ecosystem, setting the foundational infrastructure for the innovations and functionalities that followed within the BNB Ecosystem space. However, the technological landscape has been transformed with the emergence and rapid evolution of the BNB Smart Chain and advanced Layer 2 solutions such as OpBNB based on Op Stack. BSC offers high throughput, speed, and programmability that far outpace the capabilities of the BNB Beacon Chain. Maintaining the BNB Beacon Chain while focusing on BNB Ecosystem growth introduces strategic, technical, and operational complexities that divert the BNB community’s essential resources and focus.

The dual-chain structure came with consideration in the past.

  • From the security and technology point of view, at the beginning of the Smart Chain launch, not much BNB was staked; the validators were more dynamic and had less experience, so the Beacon Chain played an essential role in the security of the new blockchain. It was also believed that the governance module implementation on the Beacon Chain derived from Cosmos SDK was more mature and battle-tested than others on the EVM platform.
  • From the business point of view, the Beacon Chain was running a native decentralized exchange (DEX) at the time, which allowed token issuance, minting, burning, listing, and trading. It ran at sub-second finality and high throughput. It was expected that more token assets from the BNB Smart Chain could come across to be listed and traded on this DEX.

Things have changed as time went by:

  • The BNB Smart Chain, i.e., BSC, is more popular now. Users and developers are used to BEP20 tokens and are familiar with trading on AMM-based DEX, such as PancakeSwap. More assets run and stay at BSC.
  • More than 20M BNB are staked on BSC validators. The network is run by a group of sophisticated and professional validators. BSC itself can determine the security of BSC. Validators allocate resources that can be directed to increase the security level and the same validator set can do even more by extending their security to other networks.
  • There is a lot of maintenance associated with the Beacon Chain and the cross-chain infrastructure with BSC. The code requires timely updates and presents vast opportunities for attacks and hack attempts. As most of the community development efforts focus on BSC, L2s, and BNB Greenfield, keeping the code in the best state is challenging.
  • To new users, BEP2 and BEP20 are confusing and can be easily misused.

The decision to decommission the BNB Beacon Chain in favor of the BNB Smart Chain can be justified by various strategic, technical, Streamlining validators, and Governance reasons. With all these considerations, it would be a strategic move for the BNB Community to propose a “fusion” by merging BNB Beacon Chain and Smart Chain in the next 12-24 months.

High-level steps could look like this:

  1. Move all BNB governance functions to BSC, including BNB staking, BSC validator elections, governance proposals, and votes.
  2. Move all BEP2 tokens to BEP20. There may be long-term facilitation to help users to convert the BEP2 tokens to BEP20 tokens for a longer time, even after the Beacon Chain has been merged.
  3. Move all dApps that require high-speed ledgers to BSC L2s.
  4. Save all Beacon Chain code, binaries, blocks, and the final state to BNB Greenfield, accompanied by its hash, for another 20 years after the Beacon Chain validators cease to run the network.
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I agree and it’s a great idea thinking about allocation of development resources. To complete the BNB ecosystem beyond BSC, greenfield and OpBNB, we need an BNB L2 on ETH that serves as a channel/connection between the two ecosystems.

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