Joel Monegro, an analyst at the well-known fund Union Square Ventures, wrote an article called "Fat Protocol" in 2016, which attracted a large number of talents to participate in the construction of the crypto world. In the article, Joel Monegro explained that in the blockchain technology stack, a lot of value is concentrated in the protocol layer.

In November 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, opening the door to the blockchain world.

Then, in 2014, Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum white paper, which brought "smart contracts" to the blockchain. The emergence of smart contracts popularized the concept of "decentralization". After years of industry development, decentralized protocols such as DeFi and DAO have begun to become a force for changing the world.

After many years of smart contracts, the development of the protocol layer seems to have reached a bottleneck. Many people believe that fat protocols are dead and that the next era may be the era of fat applications. At this time, BNB Chain released the BNB Greenfield white paper on February 1, 2023. BNB Greenfield is a side chain that will become the third chain in the BNB Chain network and is committed to integrating smart contracts and decentralized storage.

BNB Greenfield is not a brand new innovative technology, but it is definitely not old wine in a new bottle. When technology is developing slowly, it is also an innovation to transform and iterate existing technology and create products that are more suitable for current development trends.

In fact, after a careful reading of the BNB Greenfield white paper, I boldly speculate that if BNB Greenfield can be successfully launched, its importance to Web3 applications may be no less than the emergence of smart contracts. The native integration of "smart contracts" and "decentralization" proposed by the BNB Chain network will open up more application scenarios and business models.

One coin, three chains, a trinity

Nowadays, decentralized storage is not new. According to statistics, the effective storage capacity of Filecoin has exceeded 60 PB, and Arweave has reached hundreds of TB. However, the storage space it provides still accounts for a negligible share of the entire market. Even Web3 applications may abandon the mainstream decentralized storage protocols on the market due to efficiency, user experience and other reasons.

From the micro perspective of the Web3 industry, mainstream protocols are constantly being updated and iterated, continuously enhancing usability and performance. However, due to its own characteristics, it is still relatively backward compared to centralized data storage in some areas. So can we start from the Web3 field, thereby influencing the world and gradually eroding the share of the centralized market?

The Ethereum Foundation once tried to build the Swarm network based on Ethereum for decentralized storage. However, things did not go as planned. For various reasons, Swarm was spun off from the Ethereum Foundation and became an independent project. Even Elad Verbin, the scientific and strategic advisor of Swarm, had to admit that if the project still needs AWS to provide services, then AWS should be used first.

In the original imagination, Ethereum will adopt a trinity architecture, with Ethereum taking on the role of computing, and Swarm and Whisper taking charge of storage and communication functions. Undoubtedly, this Ethereum architecture can only exist in imagination at present.

BNB Chain took over the idea of ​​Ethereum and proposed its own solution. In the entire BNB Chain ecosystem, BNB Beacon Chain focuses on BNB governance and security, 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 core value of the entire system.

Within 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 the storage-oriented BNB Greenfield network and the decentralized Storage Providers (SP) network. Users upload their data storage requests to BNB Greenfield, and SP stores the data off-chain. There is a native cross-chain bridge between BNB Greenfield and BNB Smart Chain. All data stored on BNB Greenfield can be easily transferred to 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 EIP712. Therefore, Greenfield dApp can use existing wallet systems such as Trust Wallet, MetaMask, Ledger, and WalletConnect.

So far, other DSNs cannot provide such a seamless solution. The inability to integrate natively means that the system becomes more complex, which increases the chance of vulnerabilities and the possibility of being attacked. Native integration can effectively improve security while also providing better interoperability.

Fat protocols and fat applications

Since BNB Greenfield has not yet been officially launched, we can only look for 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, and not absolute decentralization, but gradually moving towards decentralization with the system and applications. In order to meet these design principles, BNB Greenfield excludes Filecoin's highly computationally intensive proofs and provides API primitives (similar to Amazon S3 API) and performance similar to 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. Smart contracts on the BNB Smart Chain share the same address format as accounts on the Greenfield network. Smart contracts can become the owner of data objects and inherit different permissions. This also means that BNB Chain has more commercial scenarios after the launch of BNB Greenfield.

Victor Genin, senior solution architect at BNB Chain, said, “In 2023, through BNB Greenfield, BNB Chain will create a new theme for 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 fields such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, content payment, and social media. Of course, BNB Greenfield has pointed out the direction for us technically, and more innovations need to be promoted by the industry together.

The model of Internet companies represented by Google and Meta can generally be summarized as capturing data, reintegrating it and publishing it at the application layer. To some extent, the emergence of BNB Greenfield has made fat applications possible. Since BNB Greenfield is more about exploring emerging fields, the protocol layer may still remain "fat".

As Joel Monegro wrote, the success of the application layer drives speculation at the protocol layer, so the market value of the protocol always grows faster than the total value of all the applications built on it. The growing value of the protocol layer again attracts and stimulates competition at the application layer. The shared data layer greatly reduces the barrier to entry for applications, and the end result is a vibrant and competitive application ecosystem that distributes a lot of value to a wide range of shareholders.

BNB, the universal currency of Web3

Although BNB Greenfield did not state it explicitly, it did reveal that BNB’s ultimate goal is to become the universal currency of Web3.

BNB was originally a platform token issued by Binance, which offers benefits such as fee discounts and IEO subscription. Soon after, BNB became the public chain token of Binance Chain. Due to the lack of EVM support, in 2020, a second public chain, Binance Smart Chain, was launched based on Binance Chain, both of which use BNB as the core value.

In 2022, Binance announced the biggest iteration in the history of BNB. 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 computing respectively. At the same time, BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain merged into BNB Chain. BNB will no longer refer to Binance, but will be replaced by Build and Build.

Now, BNB Chain has launched BNB Greenfield. BNB Greenfield's storage function is not only for Web3, but also for Web2. However, the most important change is that any user using BNB Greenfield must pay with BNB instead of fiat currency.

The Bitcoin Maximalism community once believed that 1 BTC = 1 BTC, and that the world would eventually be priced in BTC rather than fiat currency. However, due to the large fluctuations in BTC prices, this vision has not been realized so far. BNB is gradually moving closer to this vision, and the one-coin-three-chain BNB Chain has opened the door to a new world. The market demand for BNB will surge with the launch of BNB Greenfield.

Looking at the application and development history of BNB, one coin, three chains is just the beginning. The launch of BNB Greenfield is just the first step for BNB to become a universal currency of Web3.