- BNB Chain boasts the 2nd largest total value locked after ETH.
- 12% OF BNB Chain-house tokens are scam coins.
- The blockchain awaits a hardfork update in the coming year, planning to incorporate staking onto Beacon Chain.
BNB Chain’s $4.05 billion total value locked ranks the blockchain as the 2nd largest layer1 platform after Ethereum, according to new data from The Block Research. Though BNB Chain’s decentralized finance (DeFi) share has witnessed stable upsides since May, its total value locked declined by about 63% since January (DeFiLlama data).
The blockchain’s TVL accounted for 10.4% of the total $38.93B locked across the DeFi space. BNB Chain attracts individuals due to its low fees, quick transactions, and high throughput, making the blockchain a cost-friendly Ethereum alternative.
Home to 484 decentralized finance projects, BNB’s total value locked remains far from ETH’s $23.01 billion, which accounts for 59% of the overall decentralized finance (DeFi) total value-locked market share.
Home to Scam Coins?
BNB Chain houses more Game-Fi projects than other blockchains because of its nature. For example, the latest Binance Research data showed BNB Chain house 37% of gaming projects in the web3 ecosystem. Nonetheless, most of these projects have materialized to rug pull because of the get-rich-quicker and play-to-earn models that these games adopted.
Solidus Labs published a rug pull data recently, indicating that 12% of BNB Chain’s coins are fraud, representing the highest figure of any network. Furthermore, the report added that about 8% of all ETH coins seem programmed for rug pulls.
Platform Upgrade in the Upcoming Year
BNB Chain revealed (December 27) the planned hardfork upgrade to its Beacon Chain at 34,587,202 & 34,963,303 block height. With the current block generation pace, the hardfork will likely happen on January 2, 2023.
The blog post confirmed that the BEP159 hardfork update would welcome a permissionless election mechanism and introduce staking onto the Beacon Chain. Integrating the staking economy onto Beacon will mean the rank of scooped bonded coins on the validator candidate will determine the validator set.
Validators produce new blocks and receive incentives for their efforts. Meanwhile, BNB holders that stake will have voting rights and contribute to the platform’s future discussions.