Ankr’s Public Goods Approach Scaled the BNB Chain, Creating a Greater Impact Than Anticipated

The effect of Ankr’s initial open-source speed enhancements on the BNB Chain was much more than expected. Ankr, the fastest-growing Web3 infrastructure provider, received requests for help in improving the BNB Smart Chain’s performance throughout its dApps, games, governance platforms, and other stakeholders in the autumn of 2021.

It has since put in place numerous open-source performance improvements that have completely overhauled the BSC, with a 10x boost in RPC request throughput and 75% dramatic drop in storage requirements, as well as a 100x quicker sync process and a completely new framework for scaling the operations of the blockchain with application-specific sidechains.

BNB Chain’s Ecosystem Coordinator Samy Karim said:

“Ankr is a key infrastructure provider for the BNB Chain ecosystem — their contributions and expertise were critical in implementing upgrades to the BNB Chain with the Erigon client, rewriting Archive Node infrastructure, and creating a framework for BNB Application Sidechains. This allows the BNB Chain ecosystem to remain competitive and offer both users and builders the latest benefits.”

Ankr’s own activities initially exposed the inefficiencies of the BNB Smart Chain since they are the chain’s primary RPC provider and one of its 21 validators. Even Ankr’s crew, who had extensive BSC operations expertise, struggled to maintain block height in the face of the heavy traffic. DApps and games relied heavily on BSC due to its fast throughput and cheap fees; however, the chain became sluggish because of server capacity constraints.

It was Ankr’s responsibility to devise a multi-pronged strategy to boost the BNB Chain’s capacity after uncovering these issues. As a result of installing the Erigon client for Ethereum, Ankr’s engineering team significantly decreased storage space and sync time needs. Engineering expertise and resources were needed to complete this project. Ankr successfully implemented Erigon for the BNB Chain, and the new Erigon for the BSC was released open-source and accessible to anyone. From Chainstack to Covalent, the bulk of the ecosystem uses this method.

As a result, Ankr approached Binance with a proposition for aid in scaling the system. As an Ethereum fork, BSC’s transaction costs are lower, and the block generation time is faster; hence there are more transactions per block. This puts a lot of strain on the chain and its growth potential. As a result, Ankr presented a multichain scaling solution that could support more complex use cases like GameFi; unlike Layer-2 solutions, Ankr reworked the BSC’s consensus layer to allow the staking of new sidechain tokens while maintaining its full EVM functionality. Thus, BNB Application Sidechains would enable projects to establish their own chains as Layer-1s with their own native ERC-20 or BEP-20 tokens and comprehensive chain customization.

Because of their involvement in the development of BAS, Ankr is in a unique position to assist projects in launching their blockchains based on this new scaling framework with a full set of tools such as customized system contracts, custom tokenomics, inflation models, global gas fee revenues, testnet faucets, block explorers, and gaming SDKs. BAS Meta Apes, Ankr’s debut game on BAS, went live without a hitch. For the Meta Apes game company, Ankr gave its open-source gaming SDK, which enabled them to take an already-popular game called Age of Apes, and give it full Web3, blockchain and crypto features.

With the first BNB Liquid Staking solution, Ankr continues to assist the BNB Chain ecosystem by adding DeFi composability on top of staked BNB. This implies that BNB holders can use their assets on DeFi in various ways, such as staking, farming, lending, contributing to vaults, and more, all at the same time. Because it’s open-source, it may be used with any BNB DeFi platform. As a result, the whole BNB ecosystem benefits from higher TVL and DeFi incentives.

Using a beacon chain paradigm of multichain communication, Ankr will continue to maintain the BNB Chain ecosystem by releasing updates that enhance security. More native cross-chain asset transfer capabilities will be developed, with reduced transfer costs and higher security levels.