It’s now official that the Binance Chain is live. Launched on Thursday, April 18th, the native blockchain by leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has deployed its genesis block. In addition, the team at Binance announced that they will be swapping the Binance Coin tokens from the current Ethereum network over the newly launched network.
Binance Coin [BNB] is currently valued at about $3 billion in market capitalization, the most valuable token on the ERC-20 Ethereum standard. The token swap will be performed on Tuesday, April 23rd.
A tweet by Binance stated that “@Binance Chain launches its Mainnet and plans to execute Mainnet Swap on Apr 23, 2019.”
According to the exchange, the BNB token activation on the Binance Chain Mainnet will happen on April 23rd, and all holders of ERC-20 compliant BNB will be required to migrate their balances over to the new platform to allow the network to destroy the ERC-20 tokens.
Similar to the current supply schedule, 200 million BNB tokens will be generated with about 48 million being frozen and a further 11,654,398 being burned to maintain the current circulating supply and token valuation. Not to worry, though, Binance.com will help users migrate their tokens over to the new network.
The Binance team expects to attract the current horde of developers on the Ethereum network as well as other competing blockchains including EOS and Tron. As opposed to Ethereum network that currently uses the Proof of Work consensus mechanism, Binance Chain will be based on the more scalable Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) algorithm. The network is effectively more scalable using this algorithm, however, at the expense of decentralization.
For instance, at the launch of the network yesterday, Binance has preselected 11 validators to help in transaction confirmation. The Binance Chain block explorer and wallet are currently inaccessible to the public until April 23rd during the BNB token swap.
Another interesting fact on the use of BNB on the network is that Binance is aiming to replicate the Ethereum blockchain down to its functionality but create a better network in terms of speed and cost of transactions.
The BNB tokens will, therefore, be used as gas on the network to facilitate transaction confirmation. “BNB will be used as gas on Binance Chain, to assist network transactions. Also, for background on the migration: ‘BNB will be converted from ERC20 tokens into native BNB tokens running on Binance Chain via the exchange platform at Binance.com, a pragmatic and efficient way to perform the initial token swap”
