BNB Chain launches its zero-knowledge proof scaling technology

It’s official: BNB Chain has launched the testnet of zkBNB, its new zero-knowledge (ZK) scaling technology. 

BNB Chain’s new zero-knowledge solution

In an official blog post yesterday, the developers of the blockchain behind BNB (Binance’s cryptocurrency) revealed that the official release of their zkBNB Testnet took place on 2 September, with the goal of providing a more advanced and secure blockchain infrastructure for Web3 dApps. 

The code was made open-source with the aim of increasingly expanding the use of zkBNB to specific use cases, and experimenting with additional cutting-edge features. 

Zero-knowledge-proof scaling technology was designed precisely to promote scalability, which is the ability to handle large amounts of transactions faster and more economically in a secure and efficient manner. 

In fact, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) serves primarily to simultaneously improve both privacy and network congestion. 

They are based on the concept of simplifying as much as possible the transactions to be recorded on the blockchain by eliminating all data that is not strictly necessary, thus effectively compressing its weight in bytes. This makes it less expensive to record the transaction on the blockchain, takes up less space within the blocks, making it possible to enter more transactions, and increases the level of privacy. 

In addition, according to the BNB Chain team, their zkBNB solution will also have a significant impact on the ability of developers to create new BNB Smart Chain-based applications at scale and with a high level of security, due to increased speed and guaranteed transaction with significantly reduced transaction fees.

zkBNB compresses several sidechain transactions into a single transaction that generates a single cryptographic proof, commonly identified as SNARK. This, among other things, will enable atomic swaps on BNB Chain using only a few lines of code, making digital assets automatically exchangeable in a permissionless manner using DeFi’s liquidity pools and AMM swaps.

The benefits of BNB Chain’s innovative zero-knowledge solution (zkBNB)

With zkBNB BNB Chain will be able to support 100 million addresses and handle up to 10,000 transactions per second.

The BNB Chain team claims that particularly benefiting from this innovation could be developers of dApps for NFTs, which moreover will also be able to use an integrated NFT marketplace and API services that enable teams to build “out-of-the-box” marketplaces for cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

It is worth noting that the problem of fees is especially felt in the NFT marketplace, as NFTs of low value, or sometimes even negligible value, are often launched, for which the impact of high fees can make their transfer from one wallet to another downright inconvenient. 

The BNB Chain team notes that the problem also specifically arises in blockchain games and social media-related crypto projects, where user experience is a priority. 

What’s more, zkBNB also allows readable names to be used within transactions, for example, to store sender and recipient addresses. 

The market entry of zkBNB and the outlook on BNB pricing

The launch of zkBNB on the Mainnet is scheduled for later this year.

Today the price of BNB goes up by 5%, and it is possible that it was also influenced by this news. 

In fact, over the past 30 days it had fallen from $324 to $261, only to rebound today to nearly $280. 

The current price remains 14% lower than it was a month ago, and 33% lower than it was a year ago. 

Given that compared to the all-time high of May 2021 it is down less than 60%, it is possible to say that among the major cryptocurrencies, BNB is one of those that is holding up best to the bear market. BTC, for example, is still down 72 percent, while ETH is down 67 percent. 

Then again, BNB has several concrete use cases within the Binance ecosystem, which is the largest crypto exchange in the world. 

BNB is currently the third largest true cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, if you exclude stablecoins, although it only capitalizes a little more than a tenth of Bitcoin. Overall, however, it is worth nearly three times as much as the fourth cryptocurrency in this special ranking, namely XRP (formerly Ripple). 

For these and other reasons, BNB’s path in the markets looks slightly different from that of BTC and ETH, so much so that these three cryptocurrencies are the ones that are definitely going their own way, while remaining somewhat connected.