Author: Oh, ODAILY Planet Daily
On the evening of February 1, BNB Chain released the BNB Greenfield white paper. This is the third chain in the BNB ecosystem after BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain.
For developers and users, the most interesting aspect of this chain is that it has both storage and computing capabilities.
Specifically for developers, the native storage function allows dApps that require data storage to avoid developing on two sets of infrastructure. It is also more convenient for users who need to use the storage function. Since storage and calculation are based on the same account, the user's data sovereignty can be clarified.
This innovation may bring us a large number of imaginative new use cases in the future, and its wide range of scenarios and application prospects will also bring new value capture channels to BNB.
What is BNB Greenfield?
What are the cornerstones of a decentralized Internet world? Assets, compute, storage.
Various emerging crypto-assets that have emerged since the birth of Bitcoin have provided a carrier for value transfer in the decentralized world. Public chains with increasingly powerful performance provide the necessary computing power for the decentralized world.
When Turing-complete Ethereum brought smart contracts to the crypto world, smart contracts became an indispensable part of the crypto world. Smart contracts with computing power bring programmability and composability to the crypto world, which also lays the foundation for the prosperity of DeFi and NFT.
In order to bring complete decentralized services to users and ultimately transition our Internet world to a completely decentralized one, I am afraid that the chain is still missing an important link - storage.
Although existing decentralized storage solutions can solve many problems, such as data privacy protection, censorship resistance, etc., the current decentralized system is still not mature enough.
In this context, BNB Greenfield, as a decentralized data storage system with smart contract integration for Web3 applications, aims to innovate the data ownership economy and bring new standards of utility to Web3.
From the perspective of specific functions, BNB Greenfield will be the distributed storage infrastructure of BNB Chain. With BNB Greenfield, anyone who has a BNB Chain address and holds BNB can use DropBox to seamlessly store data and deploy websites on BNBGreenfield.
BNB Greenfield uses an API interface similar to AWS S3. Users can programmatically operate their data, and can also store historical data of the BNB smart chain and other infrastructure data of the BNB ecosystem. Different from most decentralized storage that emphasizes close integration with the encryption world, BNB Greenfield has taken into account the huge Web2 world from the beginning of its design. In addition to using more mainstream APIs, its storage services will also be priced in US dollars, but Payments will still be made in BNB.
The test network of Web3 infrastructure built by the BNB Chain core team is supported by community development teams from Amazon Web Services, NodeReal, and Blockdaemon.
From 1 to 100, what are the problems with distributed storage?
In order to solve the storage problem, the encryption world has been actively exploring solutions. Decentralized storage can be said to be a topic with a long history.
From the early IPFS, Filecoin, Swarm, to Arweave, which has emerged in this bull market, the need to store data on the chain has basically been met. But progress from 0 to 1 does not mean that the infrastructure in this sector is “easy to use” enough.
In the early days of decentralized storage (you could even call it "prehistoric times"), the Ethereum network was used for distributed storage. Although Ethereum cannot be used to store files, "data" can be written to Ethereum in a transaction. Therefore, many enthusiasts have converted images into base 64 strings and stored them on Ethereum. However, when it comes to large amounts of data storage, Ethereum doesn’t fit the bill. Moreover, deploying larger data to mainnet will be very expensive due to gas fees.
For this reason, a number of decentralized storage networks were born.
Take IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) as an example. This protocol was launched as early as 2015. The development team mainly benchmarks it against the HTTP protocol of the Internet, aiming to supplement or even replace it. The vision is ambitious and versatile. But the disadvantage of this infrastructure is that the network is too decentralized, and the point-to-point mechanism makes it difficult to permanently save files saved by IPFS. And the economic system was not cleverly introduced, making it lack incentives.
The incentive mechanism based on the IPFS protocol and the public chain system Filecoin have made changes to a certain extent. It serves as both the storage layer of IPFS and the incentive layer of the IPFS protocol. IPFS is the application layer of the entire system. Filecoin and IPFS are both developed by Protocol Labs, and the two protocols share multiple functional modules.
However, Filecoin mining hardware requirements are relatively high, and there is too much junk data on the network. Its performance and download speed are also major constraints affecting its development. The obsolescence of the project has also caused many product concepts to deviate from the existing situation, and it has lost its former traffic and attention.
In 2018, Arweave was launched. The rise of Arweave in the latest bull market has ushered in the "new king" of the long-dormant storage sector. The purpose of Arweave is to store data reliably for a long time and provide a storage solution called Permaweb permanent network. The network does not use a blockchain structure, but uses blockweave. On this network, users can pay a one-time fee and obtain an agreement for permanent file storage to achieve truly permanent data storage for the first time.
In the implementation scenario, the characteristics of Arweave make it narrow in scope of application, and it is more used to store art resources that are used statically, such as some dApp pictures, NFT pictures, etc.
Taking a comprehensive look at the entire decentralized storage track, applicable scenarios and ecological applications are almost the common limitations of all storage networks. Currently, decentralized storage is mostly used to store some "art resources" that are not highly coupled (such as NFT small pictures). There is no inevitable connection between computing and decentralized storage in many Web3 projects.
If dApp wants to read and write frequently on the storage network, developers must develop cross-chain on two networks (the chain where the smart contract is located and the chain where the storage is located). What affects the experience even more is that the user himself cannot use the ID of one chain to control the data of two different networks at the same time.
BNB Greenfield will solve this problem for us.
In short, BNB Greenfield is an EVM decentralized storage network. It meets both computing and storage needs.
The imagination space of “storage + computing”
Based on the most basic characteristics of the blockchain, users can have autonomy over tokens through their accounts. But when the use cases were expanded to a larger scope of use, some problems arose. For example, users cannot prove their sovereignty over data on another network (storage network) simply by using the ID of one network.
Smart contracts are not a new thing, but in existing decentralized networks, whether they are mainstream public chains, new public chains, or L2, they only bring more useful "computing power." Although it can be connected to other storage networks, this non-native cross-network development always brings certain troubles and unfriendly user experience to developers.
If smart contracts and decentralized storage can be natively integrated from the beginning and cooperate with the existing huge dApp ecosystem, it will be a milestone for Web3.
After the release of BNB Greenfield, this chain gave developers the ability to store and compute simultaneously on the same chain. This capability can enable many on-chain and off-chain applications.
Within BNB Greenfield, users can create, read, share and even execute data, and its user experience and cost will be close to the currently popular Web2 cloud storage service. Users can fully own their data assets and decide who can use the data and how. Users' data assets can be easily placed into a broad, smart contract-based economic environment to obtain financial value.
Victor Genin, senior solution architect of BNB Chain, believes that “2021 is a year of breakthrough progress for DeFi. In 2022, the decentralization of NFT and digital ownership will rise. And in 2023, through BNB Greenfield, BNB Chain will Creating a new theme for data ownership and utility. BNB Greenfield will bring utility and financialization opportunities to data in storage, and programmability to data ownership."
The native integration of BNB Greenfield and BNB Smart Chain brings a wealth of imagination for future applications. By allowing smart contracts to interact with users' own data assets, both ownership and read permissions can be managed financially through NFTs by the EOA wallet on the BNB Smart Chain. EOA can not only manage NFTs on behalf of data, but also the data itself. The native cross-chain protocol can further promote the concept of "data ownership" of Web3, such as:
1. Authors can digitally publish and sell works directly on the BNB smart chain through smart contracts;
2. Data creators can upload and exchange their products in smart contracts and combine with other DeFi;
3. Decentralized social media can be built on BNB Greenfield. Users can own their own data on BNB Greenfield and store their social data in a decentralized manner, while different social media front-ends facilitate users to build social networks. Based on this deduction, just by benchmarking Web2, we can find a variety of potential use cases such as decentralized Twitter, Tik Tok, FaceBook, etc.
4. Decentralized subscription system. By saving content through decentralized storage and restricting permissions through native smart contracts, a large number of potential use cases can be derived, such as paid blogs and membership access control.
The unification of storage and computing makes development easier for developers and unlocks many functions that were previously impossible or difficult to achieve. Based on this, more scenarios have completely decentralized solutions.
It is not difficult to find that decentralized storage, a field with a wide range of potential use cases, has a few powerful players. Although they all have different specific use cases and occupy unique market niches. However, this sector also lacks too many "modern" capabilities. Whether it is poor value capture mechanism design or multi-chain-based development experience, a more "modern" redesigned storage network is needed to provide users with better service. And BNB Greenfield is targeting this sector.
The new public chain enhances value capture capabilities for BNB
Just like BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain, BNB Greenfield will also be backed by BNB. This is already the third chain supported by BNB. The launch of BNB Greenfield will once again broaden the usage scenarios of BNB, and the native storage function will also bring more application value to BNB.
In February 2022, after the reintegration of BNB Chain, its structure can benchmark against Ethereum. BNB Beacon Chain (formerly Binance Chain) provides a secure technical bottom layer, and BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain) has actually become the execution layer. . In its ecosystem, Dapp covers multiple sectors, including DeFi, NFT, GameFi, Metaverse, cross-chain, derivatives, infrastructure, etc., covering almost all areas of the on-chain world.
However, in the upcoming Web3 era, an important sector has not yet been covered by BNB, which is the "storage" function launched this time. When Web3 is adopted on a large scale, the storage of large amounts of important data cannot be safely handed over to centralized services. It can be said that BNB Greenfield has played an important role in BNB’s territory.
Before Greenfield, BNB already had multiple properties. The introduction of this storage network further illustrates Binance BNB Chain’s ambition to bet on the large-scale adoption of Web3. Upgrading from a single chain to multi-chain and improving throughput, this is a more independent and complete Layer 1 decentralized network ecosystem. As the scope of use cases expands, BNB will also benefit from the growth dividends brought by ecological development, capturing value across CeFi and DeFi.