On Tuesday, Binance announced that Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Binance Chain were merging under a new name, BNB Chain.
As per the announcement, the rebrand is part of the company’s strategy to reduce its influence on BNB and BSC as it aims to scale its products from one chain to Multichain.
“The vision is that one day everyone will own BNB, and that’s why it’s necessary to set it free. For BNB to reach its true potential, Binance and BSC must set sail on different courses,” The announcement read.
Shortly after the announcement, the exchange’s CEO Changpeng Zhao re-emphasized the reasons for the rebrand, noting that they had been doing a lot of work to decentralize BSC.
“We also realize that BNB is beyond Binance” he said in a live coverage, “we want to de-emphasize Binance going forward.”
Since debuting in 2017, BSC has grown tremendously, onboarding millions of users who hope to build and transact on safer and cheaper networks. Binance also introduced a BNB auto burn protocol that aims at reducing the amount of BNB objectively and verifiably.
BNB Chain, which will now be made up of the Binance Beacon Chain and BSC shall focus on building “the infrastructure powering the world’s parallel virtual ecosystem.” The new chain is also expected to increase openness, introduce a Multichain ecosystem, up the permissionless aspect, as well as make it easier for creators and inventors to build and interact.
Although there are other benefits to the name change, the network’s ability to host large-scale applications including GameFi, SocialFi, and the Metaverse will also receive a boost, propelling the community towards what Binance calls the “MetaFi”.
“MetaFi is a blend of two words – ‘Meta’ for meta ecosystem and ‘Fi’ for DeFi.”
Under MetaFi, BNB Chain will be able to handle bigger workloads while fostering new blockchain-based ecosystems under one roof including GameFi, SocialFi, Web3, NFTs, DeFi, and the metaverse. Moreover, Binance now hopes to attract a sizeable chunk of customers in the over 1 billion crypto user-pool globally as it steps up its interoperability game under the new chain.
