Joel Monegro, an analyst at the well-known fund Union Square Ventures, wrote the article "Fat Protocol" in 2016, which attracted a large number of talents to participate in the construction of the encrypted world. In it, Joel Monegro explains that in the blockchain technology stack, a lot of value is concentrated at the protocol layer.
In November 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper, opening the door to the blockchain world.
Subsequently, Vitalik Buterin released the Ethereum white paper in 2014, which brought "smart contracts" to the blockchain. The emergence of smart contracts has made the concept of "decentralization" popular. After years of industry development, decentralized protocols such as DeFi and DAO have begun to become a force to change the world.
After many years of smart contracts, the development of the protocol layer seems to have reached a bottleneck. There are many views on the market that the fat protocol is dead, and it is believed that the next era may be the era of fat applications. At this time, on February 1, 2023, BNB Chain released the BNB Greenfield white paper. BNB Greenfield is a side chain that will become the third chain in the BNB Chain network and is dedicated to integrating smart contracts and decentralized storage.
BNB Greenfield isn't a new innovation, but it's certainly not old wine in new bottles either. When technology develops slowly, it is also a kind of innovation to transform and iterate existing technologies and create products that are more suitable for current development trends.
first level title
One coin, three chains, trinity
Today, decentralized storage is nothing new. According to statistics, the effective storage capacity of Filecoin's entire network has exceeded 60 PB, and Arweave has reached hundreds of TB. However, the storage space it provides accounts for an insignificant share of the entire market. Even for Web3 applications, the current mainstream decentralized storage protocols on the market may be abandoned due to reasons such as efficiency and user experience.
From the microscopic perspective of the Web3 industry, mainstream protocols are constantly updating and iterating to continuously enhance usability and performance. However, due to its own characteristics, it is still relatively backward compared with centralized data storage in some fields. So is it possible to start with the Web3 field first, thereby affecting the world, and gradually eroding the share of the centralized market?
The Ethereum Foundation has tried to build a Swarm network that can be used for decentralized storage based on Ethereum. However, contrary to expectations, due to various reasons, Swarm was spun off from the Ethereum Foundation and became an independent project. Even Elad Verbin, Swarm's scientific advisor and strategic advisor, has to admit that if a project still needs AWS to provide services, then use AWS first.
In the original imagination, Ethereum will adopt a trinity architecture, Ethereum will assume the role of computing, and Swarm and Whisper will be responsible for storage and communication functions. There is no doubt that the architecture of Ethereum can only exist in the imagination at present.
BNB Chain took over the idea of Ethereum and put forward its own proposal. At the ecological level of the entire BNB Chain, BNB Beacon Chain focuses on BNB governance and security, BNB Smart Chain (BNB Smart Chain) provides smart contract computing, and BNB Greenfield provides decentralized storage. The three are responsible for different tasks, but all use BNB as the value core of the entire system.
Inside the BNB Chain system, BNB Greenfield Core, BNB Greenfield dApps and BNB Smart Chain work together to form a trinity architecture. BNB Greenfield Core consists of a storage-oriented BNB Greenfield network and a decentralized Storage Providers (SP) network. Users upload their data storage requests to BNB Greenfield, and SPs store the data off-chain. There is a native cross-chain bridge between BNB Greenfield and the BNB Smart Chain. All data stored on BNB Greenfield can be easily transferred to the BNB Smart Chain and used in the existing BNB Chain dApp ecosystem.
Greenfield users can use the same address format as Ethereum and BSC, and the blockchain also supports the same signature verification as EIP 712. Therefore, Greenfield dApp can utilize existing wallet systems such as Trust Wallet, MetaMask, Ledger, and WalletConnect.
first level title
Fat Protocols and Fat Applications
Since BNB Greenfield has not yet been officially launched, we can only find its technical path from the white paper and imagine how it will change the industry.
At the beginning of the design, BNB Greenfield proposed five major design principles, simplicity, upgradeable iteration, openness, compatibility with Web2 and Web3, not absolute decentralization, but gradually advancing toward decentralization with systems and applications. To meet these design principles, BNB Greenfield excludes Filecoin's highly computationally intensive proofs and provides similar API primitives (similar to Amazon S 3 API) and performance as existing Web2 popular cloud storage.
As we all know, it took several years for smart contracts to change the industry from being proposed. DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi and other fields all rely on smart contracts. The smart contract on the BNB smart chain and the account on the Greenfield network share the same address format, and the smart contract can become the owner of the data object and inherit different permissions. This also means that the BNB Chain after the launch of BNB Greenfield has more business scenario applications.
Victor Genin, Senior Solution Architect of BNB Chain, said, “In 2023, through BNB Greenfield, BNB Chain will create a new theme of data ownership and utility. BNB Greenfield will bring utility and financialization opportunities to data in storage, And bring programmability to data ownership.”
According to the deduction of BNB Chain, BNB Greenfield can be used for storage in subsequent website hosting, personal cloud storage, content payment, social media and other fields. Of course, BNB Greenfield has pointed out the direction for us technically, and more innovations need to be promoted by the industry.
The mode of Internet companies represented by Google and Meta can generally be summarized as capturing data, re-integrating and releasing it at the application layer. To some extent, the emergence of BNB Greenfield has made fat applications possible. Since BNB Greenfield is more about the development of emerging fields, the protocol layer may still remain "fat".
first level title
BNB, Web3 universal currency
Seeing little knowledge, although BNB Greenfield did not make it clear, it did reveal that the ultimate journey of BNB is to become the common currency of Web3.
BNB was originally a platform token issued by Binance, which can enjoy discounts on handling fees, IEO subscription and other benefits. Immediately afterwards, BNB became the public chain token of Binance Chain. Due to the lack of EVM support, in 2020, on the basis of Binance Chain, the second public chain, Binance Smart Chain, was launched, both of which use BNB as the core value.
In 2022, Binance announced the largest iteration in BNB history. Binance Chain was updated to BNB Beacon Chain, and Binance Smart Chain was updated to BNB Smart Chain. The two are responsible for governance, voting, and smart contract calculations respectively. At the same time, BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain merged into BNB Chain. BNB will no longer be a reference to Binance, but will be replaced by Build and Build.
Now, BNB Chain has launched BNB Greenfield. The storage function of BNB Greenfield is not only oriented to Web3, but also adapted to Web2. However, the most important change is that any user who uses BNB Greenfield needs to use BNB for payment, not fiat currency.
The Bitcoin Maximalism group once believed that 1 BTC = 1 BTC, and the world will eventually be denominated in BTC instead of fiat currency. However, due to the high volatility of BTC price, this vision has not been realized so far. BNB is gradually moving closer to this vision, and BNB Chain's one-coin three-chain opens the door to a new world. The market demand for BNB will surge with the launch of BNB Greenfield.
Throughout the application and development history of BNB, one coin and three chains are just the beginning. The launch of BNB Greenfield is only the first step of BNB towards the common currency of Web3.
