In a major development from the world's largest smart contract capable blockchain network in terms of transaction volumes and daily active users - BNB Chain has recently announced its roadmap for 2023. In the technical roadmap laid out by the developers, BNB Chain outlines plans to make significant improvements in network performance, scalability, security, decentralization and infrastructure this year.

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According to a report by CoinDesk, Alvin Kan, BNB Chain's director of growth said this with regards to the 2023 technical roadmap,

"Our overarching goals for 2023 are the EVM compatibility and mainnet launch of our new [layer 2] infrastructure, zkBNB, and BNB Greenfield, the blockchain-based Web3 infrastructure."

In the blog post by the BNB Chain team, the scalability aspect is expected to take the widest approach, and the plan mentions that the team will tackle the issue in a "multi-pronged fashion", which will include mass adoption infrastructure, improving Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) capacities, on and off-chain storage integrations, multichain strategies and several more. According to the post,

“One of the main limitations of blockchain technology is its performance, or the ability to process transactions reliably and quickly."

One of BNB Chain's biggest criticisms has been the extremely poor validator count on the network and the technical roadmap for 2023 is also expected to address that and improve the validator count progressively to 100, which currently stands at 29. BNB Chain has had an impressive growth thanks to the suite of crypto services it offers; however, it has been lagging behind other competing layer-1 blockchain networks in terms of pure decentralization.

In light of the massive $570 million hack that the BNB Chain had suffered back in October 2022 - the roadmap for 2023 has also outlined in the blog post that it is also seeking to improve the security of the network as well. This hack has been the largest exploit on the network till date, and thus security of the network is going to be crucial to the network's growth and future prospects. This is because as the network grows and brings more users into its fold, complications tend to grow bigger as do the stakes and thus the margin for errors grows smaller and smaller still.

The changes from the roadmap also include a series of upgrades to Web3 applications, including a communication layer on-chain to provide real-time tech support for developers and users on the network. It is also planning to find a way of unlocking new privacy use cases from a regulatory and compliance perspective.

The blockchain also has plans to improve its overall throughput from 140 million gas limit to 300 million gas limit and the transaction speeds from 2200 TPS (transactions per second) to 5000 TPS.

BNB Chain has also mentioned in its roadmap that it is planning to add Optimistic rollups to support a wider variety of use cases in its ecosystem. An Optimistic rollup is essentially an approach to scaling a blockchain that involves moving on-chain computation and state storage away from the blockchain. This was designed to make transactions cheaper and faster.

What is a BNB Chain though?

BNB Chain is essentially a product of the merging of the older Binance Chain (earlier built upon the Ethereum blockchain) and the Binance Smart Chain (this was a smart-contract capable network built in parallel to the Binance Chain to get around the programmability restrictions of Ethereum, and also to move to a variation of a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism). It also features Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility and is thus a true multi-chain ecosystem capable of executing both BNB and Ethereum-based applications.

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