On Tuesday, has changed the names of its two blockchains, the Binance Chain and the Binance Smart Chain, to BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain. The BNB Beacon Chain will manage on-chain transactions and governance features like staking and voting, while the BSC will maintain its EVM compatibility and consensus layers while expanding to a multi-chain ecosystem.
During the DeFi summer, the Binance Smart Chain, introduced in 2020, allowed the exchange to compete against Ethereum’s DeFi dominance by giving investors a cheaper, but more centralised alternative. The rebranding marks the BSC’s shift from a DeFi-centric chain to one that is expanding into new blockchain trends such as the metaverse and GameFi. Binance plans to increase the BSC’s scalability by nearly doubling its validator set from 21 to 41. The BNB, or Binance Coin, which was created on the Binance Chain (BNB Beacon Chain), is still the BSC smart contract ecosystem’s gas token, and was trading at US $431 at press time.
