BNB is the native coin of the Binance Exchange, it was launched through a ICO held in July 2017 shortly after the exchange went online, and saw Binance raise $15 million in funding, with BNB price at $0.10 during the ICO. BNB runs on two blockchain: The Beacon Chain and the BNB Smart Chain. BNB will run on the “BNB Smart Chain” (BSC) in the same way as ETH runs on Ethereum so that it remains as “native token” for both BSC and BC. This means, in addition to BNB is used to pay most of the fees on Beacon Chain and Binance DEX, BNB will be also used to:

• pay “fees“ to deploy smart contracts on BSC.
• stake on selected BSC validators, and get corresponding rewards.
• perform cross-chain operations, such as transfer token assets across BC and BSC.

After the creation of the parallel blockchain into the BNB Chain ecosystem, two blockchains will run side by side to provide different services. The new parallel chain will be called “BNB Smart Chain” (BSC), while the existing mainnet will be named “Beacon Chain” (BC).

BC is a Tendermint-based, instant finality blockchain. Validators with at least ⅔*N+1 of the total voting power will co-sign each block on the chain. So that it is practical to verify the block transactions and even the state value via Block Header and Merkle Proof verification. This has been researched and implemented as “Light-Client Protocol”, which are intensively discussed in the Ethereum community, studied and implemented for Cosmos inter-chain communication.

BSC uses Proof of Staked Authority consensus protocol, which has a chance to fork and requires confirmation of more blocks. One block only has the signature of one validator, so that it is not easy to rely on one block to verify data from BSC.

One of the biggest critic to this coin is its centralized nature, with most of the nodes controlled by Binance or Binance affiliates.