BNB Chain Announces Sidechains Similar to Polkadot’s Parachains

Binance Chain (also rebranded into BNB Chain), the layer 1 blockchain that hosts Binance Coin (BNB), will have an upgrade that will help it scale better and accommodate more diversified applications.

Specifically, Binance Chain will introduce its BNB Chain Application Sidechain (BAS) to help it cater to more application-specific uses while increasing scalability. Basically, this is similar to parachains popularized by Polkadot and Kusama.

However, these BNB Chain sidechains do not necessarily function in exactly the same way as parachains. Binance Labs – the core development team behind BNB Chain – has yet to reveal all the details.

Nevertheless, they ruled out the possibility of these sidechains becoming equal layer 1 blockchains, which is the case with parachains. With Polkadot and Kusama, these parachains are all connected to the relay chain and they require some network governance decisions before any meaningful changes get implemented.

Meanwhile, BNB Chain sidechains will not achieve the same level of autonomy, although the main purpose will be similar.

“The BAS is an infrastructure introduced to help developers and node operators build and run their own blockchain as their internal value system,” a spokesperson from Binance Labs said to TheBlock. “[This infrastructure will cater to] a massive number of users while still maintaining a close connection with BNB Chain.”

To bring the uninitiated up to speed, Binance Chain is an entirely different blockchain from Binance Smart Chain. The former is the blockchain where Binance Coin runs. Also, it does not enable smart contracts. Meanwhile, the latter is the blockchain ecosystem that hosts a plethora of decentralized applications (DApps) and that enables developers to mint BEP-20 tokens.