The BNB Chain community recently released a new and detailed technology roadmap, outlining major deployments on the mainnet.
These major deployments include strengthening BNB Chain's infrastructure and governance for developers to help build high-volume Dapps that offer increased capacity, faster transactions, increased decentralization, network security, and stability to the consumers.
Key focus areas for the 2022 tech roadmap include decentralization, faster transaction speed, multichain integration, and sidechain infrastructure. There will be an increased focus on supporting developers, innovation, and sustainability
The technology roadmap, which is one of BNB Chain’s most comprehensive development programs ever announced, was unveiled on May 31, 2022, at the BNB Chain Revelation Summit.
This was where BNB Chain also announced the new phase of its incubation program, the Most Valuable Builder (MVB) V program and educational efforts to boost the number of Web3 software engineers working in the ecosystem.
BNB Chain also introduced for the first time, as avatars, V, its Chief Scientist, and K, Chief Ecosystem Pilot.
V has been leading research and architecture in BNB Chain’s Core dev team since the very inception of the protocol, and K joins now to foster blockchain innovation in the ecosystem.
BNB Chain is the world’s largest smart contract blockchain in terms of transaction volume and users, recently passing three billion transactions since its creation in 2020.
The BNB Chain developer community continuously innovates so that BNB Chain remains a highly competitive and functional blockchain infrastructure. These technological advancements are significant as they will bring substantial changes for both the developer community and end users.
The most exciting components include next generation scalable frameworks – BAS and zkBAS, offering ultra-high TPS and smooth cross-chain experience, the introduction of more validator sets to increase decentralization, open sourcing BNB Beacon Chain, and fast finality mechanism.
The emphasis will be on innovation, sustainability, strengthening the governance mechanism of BNB Chain, and investing heavily in security.
From Q1 to Q3 2022, BNB Chain Core Dev has been working with community partners, such as NodeReal, to continuously improve the BNB infrastructure itself from network capacity, to network decentralization and stabilities.
A key element for speed and performance will be the increase in Block Gas Capacity on BNB Smart Chain (BSC) to 200 million.
End users will see less congestion and faster transactions with this release. Validators and node runners will also benefit from the prune tools' reduced disk footprint. This improvement will mean a flawless dApp experience even amid peak network traffic.
BEP-127 aims to create a temporary maintenance mode for validators so they can schedule emergency maintenance without affecting mainnet performance.
This increases network stability by allowing them to troubleshoot system breakdowns without compromising performance. End-users should expect high capacity, decreased congestion, and faster transaction speed.
Also in terms of performance, in Q3, BEP-126 introduces Fast Finality Mechanism to implement BLS-based multi-signature for P2P channels and attest blocks to fast finalize blockchain state.
By reducing transaction time, end-users will have a smoother cross-chain experience. Q3 also sees the introduction of Parallel EVM, again with the same objective of increasing speed in the network and thus facilitating more transactions at a lower cost, as well as optimal cross-chain experience.
BEP-131 will introduce BNB Smart Chain Candidate Validators. This proposal will increase validators on BNB Smart Chain (BSC) from 21 to 41 in Phase 1, increasing decentralization and incentivizing validators to upgrade hardware and infrastructure.
A more competitive consensus will allow smaller candidate validators a chance to earn rewards. Decentralization increases network security and stability for end users, and is a core element of BNB’s strategy.
BNB Beacon Chain will open-source Binance Decentralized Exchange (DEX) in Q2 2022. Developers will have access to the DEX's matching engine open source code, an important development for the open source movement.
BNB Application Sidechains (BAS) are the most innovative aspect of this year’s roadmap, bringing a significant benefit for the developer teams building in the BNB ecosystem.
The BNB Core team, NodeReal, Celer, and Ankr launched the BAS framework on testnet earlier in the year, and after several successful pilots, the first Mainnet is going live on May 31, 2022 with META Apes, and Metaverse World – a subsidiary of Netmarble and Project Galaxy are to launch their Mainnets as well.
They are joined by an increasing number of partners, including Mathwallet, Multichain and Pyth Network, to further support BAS infrastructure.
BAS will let developers build scalable dApps using BNB Chain sidechains. All BAS end-users can expect lower (or near zero) fees and high speed with extra capacity. The BAS infrastructure also allows for enhanced customization, such as defining its own number of validators and using your own token.
The first phase of BNB Chain Application Sidechains is now live using the PoSA (Proof of Staked Authority) consensus mechanism.
The second phase of BAS is Zero-Knowledge Rollups (zkBAS). zkBAS represents a significant tech achievement, as it opens up the way for the 10k TPS mark per zkBAS sidechain. End-users will have better cross-chain capabilities and near-zero transaction fees.
Last but not least, in Q4 and into 2023, the BNB Chain community will work on solving another tough issue in blockchain, that of excess data storage.
BNB will focus research and development in its Blockchain Storage System to solve the problem of long-term storage. This will create lighter Dapps, with cheaper decentralized storage for non-ledger data, due to optimized space management.
The entire BNB Chain community has been hard at work to bring to life the innovations and technological achievements that we are sharing today.
While we recognize that there’s still a lot to do, this is a testament to the competence of the buidlers of this ecosystem, who are not only building for high-volume dApps (with our now-surpassed goal of 3 billion transactions on-chain) with fast and low-cost transactions, but also creating inspiring tech that can stand the test of time in blockchain’s most reliable and robust platform.