Ethereum is the unquestionable king of the hill when it comes to smart contracts right now. In every metric and every regard, Ethereum is totally dominating when it comes to attracting demand for decentralized apps, or dapps, at the moment.

Considering the Ethereum ecosystem’s extensive organic activity lately, this dominance is set to continue for the foreseeable future. Yet this major demand has led to an acute spike in ETH gas prices, i.e. the fee paid for Ethereum transactions, a reality that’s boxed out many people from partaking in the Ethereum network lately.

Enter Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It’s a modified Ethereum fork and is thus compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), meaning it can easily port over Ethereum apps and users. And we’ve been seeing more of these migrations lately as some apps have been trying to win over users with cheaper transaction fees.

A non-trivial portion of this BSC activity has seemed spoofed recently, but there’s no question that Binance’s in-house smart contract platform has also been attracting unprecedented interest in this current crypto bull run amid the backdrop of acutely high ETH fees.

All this said, let’s dive into what BSC is and what it can do so we can get a realistic idea of how to accurately consider it within the cryptoeconomy’s present conditions.


What is Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
Binance Smart Chain is Binance’s smart contract platform for decentralized apps (dapps).

Specifically, the network uses a modified version of proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus known as a proof-of-staked-authority (PoSA) algorithm. Simply put, this means BSC is centered upon 21 validators who stake BNB in order to validate the BSC network.

As such, this may be a layer-one (L1) smart contract platform, but it’s also extremely centralized with 21 validators compared to the 1,000s of validators that Eth2 will have. This small set of validators, vetted by Binance, makes it easier for the crypto exchange giant to exert direct control over the network.

Another central aspect of BSC is that it’s compatible with Ethereum’s EVM, which lets BSC developers to easily migrate over popular Ethereum dapps and solutions via loosely-modified forks. This is why the vast majority of dapps on BSC today are essentially direct copies of Ethereum dapps, like how PancakeSwap was forked from Uniswap and Sushiswap.

More info. https://defiprime.com/binance-smart-chain#:~:text=Enter%20Binance%20Smart%20Chain%20(BSC,over%20Ethereum%20apps%20and%20users.