TL;DR
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has seen some nice and steady growth in on-chain activity and usage. But what does that actually mean in terms of numbers? The beauty of public blockchains is that they are… well, public. You can track the progress yourself.
Are you eager to keep tabs on BSC metrics but don't know where to start? No sweat, we've collected some important metrics from the
BscScan explorer. This way, you can keep a close eye on the growth of Binance Smart Chain.
We often talk about how public blockchains are
permissionless, meaning that anyone with an address can interact with them. What's maybe less talked about is how
development for blockchains is also permissionless. Anyone with the relevant expertise can deploy their
DApp on a blockchain, and there's no one stopping them.
This leads to fast development speed in the
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is only a few months old, but it's already seeing some impressive growth. How impressive, you ask? Well, there's a lot of publicly available on-chain data, making it easy for traders and investors to check the network activity.
BscScan is developed by the same team that created EtherScan. It's a blockchain explorer and analytics platform for Binance Smart Chain, but it also has a lot of other neat features. These can be good sources of information if you want to keep an eye on DeFi on BSC.
Yield farming (or liquidity mining) is a way to generate crypto with your existing holdings. Using platforms like
PancakeSwap, you can generate yield on the Binance Smart Chain. As we'll see with the next metric, the fees are extremely low on BSC. This makes it ideal for smaller players to enter the yield farming scene and get their fair share of the available crops.
The
BscScan yield farming dashboard shows you all the current farming opportunities. You have quick access to the latest farms and info about what they are and how they work on their dedicated websites. This should be the easiest bookmark of your life if you're one of those hard-working BSC farmers.
Another good resource for keeping track of all the different DApps in the BSC ecosystem is
https://mathdapp.store/. Just select Binance Smart Chain on the sidebar on the left, and you'll get a list of trusted BSC DApps.
As we've mentioned, BSC has extremely low fees. In BSC, 1 gwei is 10-9 or 0.000000001 BNB.
With an average gas price of 20 gwei, sending 10 BNB worth about $300 should cost you roughly $0.01. In fact, sending ten or even a hundred times that amount still shouldn't cost you more than a few cents. From the transaction history, we can see that some of the transactions paid higher fees than that. Some users may have brought their old habits from using Ethereum or other compatible tools. It's really not necessary. Binance Smart Chain is still far from congestion, so 20 gwei should be enough.
OK, so BSC is economical, but how can you gauge roughly how many users the blockchain has? The
unique address count is a good metric to start.
So does it mean that if a blockchain has 100 unique addresses, then it has 100 unique users? Absolutely not! Anyone can create multiple addresses, and thanks to the magic of cryptography, even if they did, we wouldn't run out of addresses for a long time. And even then, it would be quite difficult to find out if those addresses belong to the same entity.
So we know that anyone can create multiple addresses, and this metric is an overestimation. Still, the unique address count can give us a rough idea of the network's growth.
While some
smart contracts will require more transactions than others to execute, this chart can still give us an idea of the network's activity. BscScan also tells us the day when the number of transactions was the highest so far.
The
Token Tracker page lets you track the top
BEP-20 tokens by market capitalization or daily trading volume. This will give you an idea of which tokens have the highest cumulative value on BSC, and which are printing the highest trading volumes.
One thing to note here is the token information. Token/contract owners can update their token's information on BscScan to give you some more details about the token. For more information on how to do this, please see
this page. If the token is not verified by the BscScan team, it may not be trustworthy.
You'll see a lot of
wrapped tokens on this page. For example, the
Binance-Peg ChainLink (LINK). This means that it's
ERC-20 LINK wrapped as a BEP-20 token on BSC. Hang on, a wrapped version of what exactly?
It's a tokenized version of a coin or token that belongs to another blockchain.
But why does this exist in the first place? Well, this allows coins and tokens that are not on BSC to be used in the Binance DeFi ecosystem. For example, if you're a LINK holder and want to use your LINK to farm on BSC, you can do it without selling the token.
If you'd like to play around with wrapping tokens, check out the
Binance Bridge Project. Note that while wrapping a coin is a relatively easy process, you don’t necessarily need to do it. You can simply trade wrapped tokens that were wrapped by other people without having to worry about the wrapping process.
In simple terms, validators are the ones that make sure that BSC keeps going. By staking BNB, they process transactions and confirm new
blocks. In return for their service, they earn transaction fees that stem from network activity.
Binance Smart Chain relies on a consensus mechanism called Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA). This model of consensus can support a short block time and lower fees. You can check the top validators on Binance Smart Chain on the
Validators Leaderboard.
Who can become a validator? Well, basically anyone, but the requirements are relatively high. After all, the security of the network is at stake. If you'd like to read more about how to become a validator on Binance Smart Chain, check out the guide on
Binance Chain Docs.
Whether you're a
DeFi veteran or completely new to yield farming on BSC, these metrics can step up your game for tracking activity on the Binance Smart Chain.
However, keep in mind that the markets are irrational, unpredictable, and prone to periods of extreme volatility.
Doing your own research is crucial to success in trading or yield farming. This can include checking whether a token is certified by the BscScan team, whether the contract is open-source and has been audited, and visiting the project's blog or social media accounts to get a deeper insight. Make sure you understand the risks of participating in DeFi before you jump in.
Do you still have questions about BSC and Ethereum? Check out our Q&A platform,
Ask Academy, where the Binance community will answer your questions.
