2022 is the year that most people from the crypto space will want to forget. Leaving aside the macroeconomic stability, a host of “bad news” incidents took place successively. With the durability being outrightly put to test, a few categories, like stablecoins, managed to collectively come through. Parallelly, protocols like Cardano also managed to put up a noteworthy show from the fundamental perspective. However, Binance Coin might have come up with the biggest surprise.
Did BNB Chain Shield Itself From Crypto Winter?
A recent blog post chalked out how BNB Chain made “significant strides” this year in terms of onboarding new users into Web3. The network’s considerable capabilities saw a “huge number” of DeFi, GameFi, and SocialFi projects deploy on the BNB Chain. As a result, the BNB Chain enjoyed significant growth in 2022, despite it being crypto winter.
In terms of unique addresses, BNB Chain surpass crossed the 230 million benchmark in 2022. At press time, it was hovering around 233.7 million.
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For Ethereum, the other hand, the number currently stands at 217.3 million. That makes BNB Chain “the largest layer 1 blockchain” in the world.
The rise in the number of unique addresses points to the refinement in the number of direct participants in the ecosystem. Even though Ethereum slightly trails behind BNB Chain, for now, the macro uptrend registered by both the chains shows that their growth wasn’t paused in 2022.
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Other Advancements Made
The BNB Chain also noted record-breaking highs in terms of transaction volume. The same reached 9.8 million in May of 2022, and daily active users apex at 2.2 million in October. The post highlighted that the network’s growth, by and large, was based on “significant technological advancements and community-building initiatives” that took place this year.
The deployment of BNB Sidechain and zkBNB Testnet in 2022 was a game-changer for developers. More so, because it provided the necessary scalability, speed, and security to build dApps with large user bases.
Parallelly, the network became more decentralized this year by adding 23 additional validators to the block production process. The total number of validators now stands at 49. In fact, in the coming months, the blockchain plans to add another 40 to 60 new validators.
Pointing towards the advancements and opining on how the same impacted growth, Alvin Kan, Director of Growth & Ops at BNB Chain said,
“We launched BNB Sidechain, zkBNB, Binance Oracle, security initiatives such as AvengerDAO, among others. This has resulted in faster transactions, lower costs, and extra capacity, giving builders the confidence to onboard a large number of users.”
Furthermore, the launch of Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) helped in solidifying BNB Chain’s position in the NFT and GameFi sectors. Also, the network continued to grow in DeFi with a TVL of $7.6 billion in Q3 alone.
As far as the future outlook is concerned, the blockchain plans to launch the zkBNB mainnet in 2023. The core developer team is also working on an improved Web3 blockchain storage system that is intended to lower operation-related costs for projects on BNB Chain.
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