Understanding BNB Greenfield in One Article: A New Public Chain Connecting Storage and Computing

Author: Liao Liao, 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, following BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain.

For developers and users, the most noteworthy aspect of this chain is its simultaneous capabilities for storage and computation.

Specifically for developers, the native storage functionality allows dApps that require data storage to avoid developing on two separate infrastructures. For users needing storage functionality, it is also more convenient, as both storage and computation are based on the same account, clearly defining the user's data sovereignty.

This innovation may bring a plethora of imaginative new use cases in the future, and its broad scenarios and application prospects also provide new value capture channels for BNB.

What is BNB Greenfield?

What is the cornerstone of a decentralized internet world? Assets, computation, storage.

Various emerging crypto assets have continuously appeared since the birth of Bitcoin, providing a medium for value transfer in a decentralized world. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful public chains provide the necessary computational capabilities for this decentralized world.

When Turing-complete Ethereum introduced smart contracts to the crypto world, smart contracts became an indispensable part of it. Smart contracts with computational capabilities brought programmability and composability to the crypto world, laying the foundation for the prosperity of DeFi and NFTs.

However, to provide users with complete decentralized services and ultimately transition our internet world to a fully decentralized one, there seems to be a crucial missing link on-chain—storage.

Existing decentralized storage solutions can address many issues, such as data privacy protection and censorship resistance, but current decentralized systems are still not mature enough.

Against this backdrop, BNB Greenfield, as a decentralized data storage system integrated with Web3 application smart contracts, aims to revolutionize the data ownership economy and bring a new standard of utility to Web3.

From a functional perspective, BNB Greenfield will serve as the distributed storage infrastructure of BNB Chain. With BNB Greenfield, anyone with a BNB Chain address and holding BNB can seamlessly store data and deploy websites on BNB Greenfield in a manner similar to DropBox.

BNB Greenfield uses an API interface similar to AWS S3, allowing users to programmatically manipulate their data and store historical data from the BNB Smart Chain and other BNB ecosystem infrastructure data. Unlike most decentralized storage solutions that emphasize a close integration with the crypto world, BNB Greenfield was designed with the vast Web2 world in mind. In addition to adopting more mainstream APIs, its storage services will be priced in USD, but payments will still be made in BNB.

The test network for the Web3 infrastructure built by the BNB Chain core team has received support from community development teams from Amazon Web Services, NodeReal, and Blockdaemon.

What Issues Remain in Distributed Storage from 1 to 100?

To address storage issues, the crypto world has been actively exploring solutions. Decentralized storage can be said to be a long-standing topic.

From the early IPFS, Filecoin, and Swarm to the rise of Arweave in this bull market, the demand for on-chain data storage has largely been met. However, progress from 0 to 1 does not mean that the infrastructure in this sector is already "user-friendly."

In the early days of decentralized storage (which could even be called the "prehistoric era"), the Ethereum network was used for distributed storage. Although Ethereum cannot be used to store files, "data" can be written to Ethereum in a single transaction. As a result, many enthusiasts converted images into base 64 strings for storage on Ethereum. However, when it comes to storing large amounts of data, Ethereum does not meet the requirements. Moreover, due to gas fees, deploying larger data on the mainnet can be very expensive.

To address this, a number of decentralized storage networks were born.

Taking IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) as an example, this protocol was launched as early as 2015. The development team primarily aimed to complement or even replace the internet's HTTP protocol. Its vision is grand and highly versatile. However, the downside of this infrastructure is that the network is too decentralized, making it difficult for files stored on IPFS to achieve permanent preservation. Additionally, the lack of a cleverly introduced economic system results in a lack of incentives.

The incentive mechanism and public chain system based on the IPFS protocol, Filecoin, has made some changes. It serves as both the storage layer for IPFS and the incentive layer for the IPFS protocol, with IPFS being the application layer of the entire system. Both Filecoin and IPFS were developed by Protocol Labs, and the two protocols share multiple functional modules.

However, Filecoin has high hardware requirements for mining, and there is an excess of junk data on the network. Its performance and download speed are also significant constraints on its development. Additionally, the project's obsolescence has caused many of its product concepts to deviate from the current situation, losing past traffic and attention.

In 2018, Arweave was launched. Arweave, which rose during the recent bull market, has brought a "new king" to the long-quiet storage sector. Arweave aims to provide a long-term reliable data storage solution called Permaweb. This network does not use a blockchain structure but instead employs blockweave. On this network, users can pay once and obtain a protocol for permanent file storage, achieving true permanent data storage for the first time.

In terms of practical applications, the characteristics of Arweave make its scope of use relatively narrow, primarily for storing static art resources, such as images for some dApps, NFT images, and so on.

Overall, the entire decentralized storage track shares a common limitation in applicable scenarios and ecological applications across all storage networks. Currently, decentralized storage is more often used for storing loosely coupled "art resources" (such as small NFT images). Many Web3 projects do not have a necessary connection between computation and decentralized storage.

If a dApp needs to perform high-frequency read and write operations on a storage network, developers must inevitably engage in cross-chain development on two networks (the chain where the smart contract resides and the chain where the storage is located). What further impacts the user experience is that users cannot use an ID from one chain to simultaneously control data across two different networks.

BNB Greenfield will solve this problem for us.

In short, BNB Greenfield is a decentralized storage network based on EVM. It can meet both computational and storage needs simultaneously.

The Imagination Space of "Storage + Computation"

Based on the most fundamental characteristics of blockchain, users can have autonomy over tokens through their accounts. However, when use cases expand to a larger scope, some issues arise. For example, users cannot prove their sovereignty over data on another network (the storage network) using just one network's ID.

Smart contracts are not a new concept, but in existing decentralized networks, whether mainstream public chains, new public chains, or L2, they have only brought better "computational capabilities." Although they can connect with other storage networks, this non-native cross-network development always presents certain troubles and an unfriendly user experience for developers.

If smart contracts and decentralized storage can achieve native integration from the start and align with the existing vast dApp ecosystem, it will be a milestone event for Web3.

After the release of BNB Greenfield, this chain empowers developers to perform both storage and computation on the same chain. This capability can facilitate many on-chain and off-chain applications.

Within BNB Greenfield, users can create, read, share, and even execute data, with user experience and costs approaching those of currently popular Web2 cloud storage services. Users can fully own their data assets and decide who can use and how to use the data. Users' data assets can be conveniently placed into a broad, smart contract-based economic environment, thus gaining financial value.

Victor Genin, a senior solutions architect at BNB Chain, believes that "2021 was a year of breakthrough progress for DeFi. In 2022, the rise of NFTs and decentralized digital ownership emerged. 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 introduce programmability to data ownership."

The native integration of BNB Greenfield with BNB Smart Chain brings rich imagination space for future applications. By allowing smart contracts to interact with users' own data assets, ownership and reading permissions can be managed financially through NFTs by EOA wallets on the BNB Smart Chain. EOA can not only represent data management NFTs but also manage the data itself. Moreover, the native cross-chain protocol can further promote the concept of "data ownership" in Web3, such as:

1. Authors can directly publish and sell their works on the BNB Smart Chain through smart contracts;

2. Data creators can upload and exchange their products in smart contracts and combine them with other DeFi protocols;

3. Decentralized social media can be built on BNB Greenfield. Users can own their data on BNB Greenfield and store their social data in a decentralized manner, while different social media front-ends facilitate users in building social networks. From this perspective, just by benchmarking against Web2, we can identify various potential use cases such as decentralized Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

4. A decentralized subscription system. By saving content through decentralized storage and imposing permission restrictions via native smart contracts, a plethora of potential use cases such as paid blogs and membership access can emerge.

The unification of storage and computation makes development easier for developers and unlocks many functionalities that were previously unattainable or difficult to achieve. Based on this, more scenarios now have fully decentralized solutions.

It is not difficult to see that the decentralized storage track, with its wide range of potential use cases, has a few powerful participants. Although they each have different specific use cases and occupy unique market ecological niches, this sector also lacks many "modern" capabilities, whether in poorly designed value capture mechanisms or multi-chain development experiences. A more "modern" redesigned storage network is needed to provide better services for users, and BNB Greenfield is targeting this sector.

New Public Chain Enhances BNB's Value Capture Ability

Just like BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain, BNB Greenfield will also be supported by BNB. This is already the third chain supported by BNB, and the launch of BNB Greenfield will further broaden the use cases for BNB, with the native storage functionality bringing more application value to BNB.

In February 2022, after the reorganization of BNB Chain, its structure can be compared to Ethereum. BNB Beacon Chain (formerly Binance Chain) provides a secure technical foundation, while BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain) has effectively become the execution layer. Within its ecosystem, Dapps cover multiple sectors, including DeFi, NFTs, GameFi, Metaverse, cross-chain, derivatives, infrastructure, and almost all areas of the on-chain world.

However, in the upcoming Web3 era, an important sector remains uncovered by BNB, which is the "storage" function launched this time. As Web3 experiences mass adoption, the storage of a large amount of important data cannot be entrusted to centralized services. It can be said that BNB Greenfield has filled an important piece of the BNB landscape.

Before Greenfield, BNB already possessed multiple attributes. The introduction of this storage network further highlights Binance BNB Chain's ambition to bet on the mass adoption of Web3. Transitioning from a single chain to a multi-chain structure and enhancing throughput represents a more independent and complete Layer 1 decentralized network ecosystem. As the range of use cases expands, BNB will also benefit from the growth dividends brought by ecological development, capturing value across CeFi and DeFi.