Binance Smart Chain to ‘De-Emphasize’ Binance With BNB Chain Rebrand

Binance Smart Chain is attempting to distance itself from Binance with a network rebranding exercise that will see the project reborn as BNB Chain.

The announcement came on February 15, in a blog on the network’s new corporate website. Shortly after the announcement, Binance Investment Director Gwendolyn Regina hosted the BNB Chain introduction live stream. She was joined by key players in the BNB Chain network, including Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ). 

Regina began by asking CZ exactly what had motivated the change from Binance Smart Chain to BNB Chain. In his answer, the Binance CEO was at pains to explain just how independent BNB Chain is from Binance.

“I think for many years, people always think that Binance Smart Chain – because it carries the Binance word – people think of it as something owned by Binance, and we have done a lot of work to decentralize it,” said CZ. “We also realized that BNB is beyond Binance, it’s bigger than Binance. We call it [the token] ‘build and build’. I’ve tweeted it a few times before, BNB is its own living breathing ecosystem now with what we call the BNB Chain so we want to stress this term and de-emphasize Binance moving forward.”

Besides dropping the b-word, BNB Chain now seeks to shake off any notion that the network is centralized. As part of their efforts to demonstrate increasing decentralization, BSC will expand its validator network from 21 to 41. For those who truly care about decentralization, the devil will be in the detail of who controls those extra validators, but the success of BNB Chain to date suggests that users are not overly concerned with the issue.

The metaverse becomes MetaFi

In a day which saw BNB Chain unleash a raft of new terminology upon its audience, the company also saw fit to create a new buzzword for good measure – MetaFi. According to BNB Chain MetaFi is a catch-all term for all things DeFi in the metaverse, including GameFi, SocialFi, Web3, and NFTs.

Only time will tell if this latest DeFi buzzword catches on.

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