Binance announces technical roadmap for BNB Chain, focuses on security, dev support

Yesterday, cryptocurrency exchange Binance held its BNB Chain Revelation Summit, unveiling a year-long technical roadmap for its own blockchain, called BNB Chain. The latter details all the changes that would be made to the blockchain network, which includes increasing blockchain validator nodes for additional security, expanding capacity for sidechains and adding more potential for blockchain developers to build decentralized applications (dapps) on the blockchain – with greater performance efficiency.

The technical roadmap introduced BNB Application sidechains, a mainnet that would enable developers to build various applications based on the BNB Chain with greater ease. A mainnet of a blockchain is a public-accessible platform that can be used for creating applications.

Earlier this year, Binance combined the Binance Smart Chain and Binance Chain blockchains to create BNB Chain. The blockchain network already supported dapps and smart contracts, which are utilized by developers to create applications on a compatible blockchain.

BNB Chain now wants to expand this utility aspect, while also focusing on security. The latter involves nearly doubling the number of decentralized validators to 41 on the network. This is a key factor to improve the overall security of the network.

Blockchain validators on a proof of stake network such as the BNB Chain help validate transactions and blocks on a blockchain, in turn adding them to the decentralized ledger of a blockchain. Having a higher number of decentralized validators on a network helps make it more secure, and also protects it against security vulnerabilities on the network.

Such an issue was reflected in the security breach of Mavis’ Ethereum-based sidechain for blockchain game, Axie Infinity. The sidechain, Ronin, saw a security flaw being exploited to work around its validator nodes, in turn resulting in a theft worth millions of dollars.

The technical plan also expands the block gas capacity of the BNB Chain to 200 million, to be done by the third quarter of this year. Gas refers to the cost required to perform a transaction on a blockchain, and a gas limit or capacity refers to how quickly could a transaction be processed on a blockchain. Increasing its capacity would allow developers to create more applications based on BNB Chain.