Recently, a product called BNB.xyz was quietly launched. According to official information, this integrated on-chain platform aims to connect and maximize the returns of CeFi BNB and DeFi BNB. Core contributors include Lista DAO, PancakeSwap, and BNB Chain. At first glance, this seems to be just an ordinary yield aggregation website, but after a closer look, you will find that behind BNB.xyz is a brand new BNB value model and a brand new situation for the development of the BNB Chain ecosystem.
Gains, Gains, Gains
In this cycle, the flow of funds can be roughly classified into two logics: meme (real application scenarios) and income (real user needs). A series of thunderstorms from 2022 to 2023 caused a sharp drop in the yield level of the crypto market. The entire DeFi field seems to have suffered from "income disease". For customers with large capital, DeFi is no longer as good as before.
What’s worse is that as the market rebounded, people did not see the expected explosion of scenarios, so in the context of a lack of narratives, memes and income products became the two hot spots for capital pursuit. Putting memes aside, in terms of income, the mainstream trend of product development is basically: pursuit of income scenarios - income products - income aggregation.
EigenLayer and Pendle are two important "igniters". The former provides a source and channel for income and spawns various LRT protocols. These protocols cooperate with different L2 projects for TVL to generate more income for ETH stakers. Pendle provides an income market to improve capital efficiency. At the same time, the complexity of capital income strategies has gradually increased, and the user threshold has also increased, further spawning income aggregation asset products such as Gain power by Kelp.
Ethereum re-staking TVL growth
All of this provided sufficient growth fuel for the Ethereum ecosystem, which lacked innovation, during the bull market in the first half of the year, and the price of ETH rose from $2,500 to $4,000. However, after Eigen officially announced the airdrop, the development of AVS did not keep up with market expectations, the profit promise was broken, and the entire Ethereum ecosystem fell into a huge predicament.
At the same time, other L1 public chains are still trying to create income through re-staking, including Bitcoin. But the story logic of creating new income through shared security is becoming increasingly unclear in the context of modular narratives and strong L2 revenue performance. The phased failure of the ETH re-staking narrative is a blow to all L1 tokens that hope to engage in re-staking business. On the other hand, the second rise of the Solana ecosystem is telling everyone: every public chain needs to find its own unique value and scenario support.
「BNB Specialty Re-staking」
BNB’s Problem
During the 2021 crypto bull market, the Alt L1 public chain narrative became one of the biggest winners. The three new public chain musketeers "Solunavax" and BSC and Fantom of the EVM ecosystem are all regarded as strong competitors for the "Ethereum killer". However, after a round of great waves, there are only a few new public chain narrative players left on the table. From the perspective of market value, Solana and BNB are probably the only ones left.
But when we try to explain the source of value of these public chain survivors, we always encounter various "contradictions" in the case of BNB. In terms of market value, BNB is No. 1 among new public chains, even surpassing the powerful SOL; in terms of TVL data, BNB Chain ranks in the top three, an absolute resource-rich ecosystem; but in terms of user cognition and psychology, BNB Chain seems more like an "accessory product."
Most L1 native tokens are born for public chains, but BNB is not. It has always been regarded as an index asset of the Binance family, and its value comes from multiple business lines within the ecosystem, mainly including the Binance trading platform and BNB Chain. If we must make an analogy, BNB is more like $COIN (Coinbase and Base L2 business) in the US stock market, rather than ETH, SOL or AVAX in the crypto market.
This unique value structure makes BNB unique among crypto assets, but it also creates some bottlenecks for the development of BNB Chain.
The prosperity of the public chain ecosystem is often inseparable from the strong performance of its own L1 tokens, such as Ethereum and Solana. Interestingly, although BNB ranks among the top three public chains in terms of market value, its ecological development is far less popular than the former two. The rise and fall of BNB's price and the ecological status of BNB Chain always seem to be "separated by a layer of relationship."
This seems to be a liquidity issue. When talking about BNB, some people will think of BNB Chain, but more people still think of Binance. The consensus and expectations of BNB holders do not seem to come from the BNB Chain ecosystem itself, but from Binance's market share and Launchpool revenue. This has caused a large number of BNBs to remain on the Binance platform in pursuit of asset returns, without sufficient motivation to feed back and drive the development of the BNB Chain ecosystem.
On the other hand, although the BNB Chain ecosystem looks very strong in terms of various data indicators, for BNB holders, there is Binance Launchpool on the one hand and a wide variety of on-chain protocols on the other. Fully managing and realizing the profit potential of BNB has become a relatively complicated task.
Enter BNB.xyz
The emergence of BNB.xyz solves this problem: allowing BNB holders to reap greater returns in a simpler way, and more importantly, allowing more BNB assets on the platform to participate in the development of the BNB Chain.
BNB.xyz describes itself as a comprehensive on-chain staking platform designed for CeFi BNB (i.e. BNB holders within the Binance platform) and DeFi BNB (i.e. BNB holders on the BNB Chain) users, providing a seamless all-in-one yield aggregation solution to maximize the utility and yield returns of BNB.
At present, BNB.xyz mainly includes two main solutions: BNB staking and DeFi BNB. The former provides various staking income strategies to BNB holders, especially those on the platform, to help them maximize asset returns among different ecological protocols, while the latter provides on-chain BNB with exposure to Binance platform's Launchpool, Mega Drop and other income. BNB.xyz is equivalent to integrating various on-chain DeFi and platform staking opportunities to meet the needs and risk preferences of different users.
Enter the BNB.xyz official website and you will see a simple income dashboard that updates and summarizes the income product data of the current BNB ecosystem in real time. Users can make clear strategy comparisons and choices on one site.
Judging from this information alone, BNB.xyz seems to be just an ordinary or even somewhat rudimentary yield aggregation product, but after comparing it with the yield solutions of most ecosystems, you will find that BNB.xyz presents the BNB Chain ecosystem's unique "yield trump card" to the crypto market.
Think about it carefully, how many of the current on-chain yield protocols or assets can directly obtain institutional-level yield exposure?
During the 2023 bear market, "U.S. Treasury yields on-chain" promoted the rise of the RWA narrative, and MKR became the big winner. By purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds with treasury funds, Maker allows DAI holders to obtain risk-free returns in addition to on-chain lending. This alone makes MakerDAO the first DeFi protocol to recover and continue to be active in this cycle.
In addition to U.S. Treasury yields, Binance’s Launchpool is also an important source of income for many crypto giants. After the launch of BNB.xyz, Launchpool and other products are no longer just a revenue enablement for BNB within the platform, but have become a revenue exposure for BNB Chain, which is a shot in the arm for the liquidity and activity of the entire ecosystem.
This means that BNB’s past “consensus split” is gradually being bridged. In the past, BNB on Binance and BNB Chain created revenue through different channels and methods, serving two different groups. The BNB ecosystem liquidity was implicitly split under this revenue structure, and it was difficult for the on-chain ecosystem to take advantage of Binance.
But after BNB.xyz, BNB on Binance and on the chain will have the same profit exposure. In pursuit of maximizing profits, users will gradually promote the merger of BNB application scenarios, and ultimately liquidity will feed back to the BNB Chain ecosystem.
As one of the main contributors to BNB.xyz, BNB Chain’s leading LSD protocol ListaDAO has become the first protocol in the ecosystem to undertake revenue and liquidity empowerment. According to the ListaDAO official website, users holding slisBNB will be eligible to participate in Binance’s future Launchpools snapshots, increasing their revenue potential while maintaining liquidity.
According to ListaDAO's official website, slisBNB (ListaDAO liquidity staking token) has an annualized return of more than 33% after combining Binance Launchpool, BNB Chain native staking income and the third quarter stardust incentives, of which more than 90% comes from the accumulated income of Launchpool. Compared with all mainstream L1 public chain tokens, only BNB has an annualized return of more than 20% for native liquidity staking.
Of course, in addition to ListaDAO, BNB.xyz will integrate and integrate the wider BNB ecosystem in the future to explore diversified income options for BNB holders, such as providing unilateral staking in protocol liquidity pools such as PancakeSwap and Venus, using BNB or slisBNB as lending collateral, and obtaining snapshot qualifications for new protocol airdrops. As an aggregation service provider, BNB.xyz will conduct comprehensive due diligence, risk classification and assessment of integrated projects based on Binance’s strategic decisions with high legitimacy and reliability standards.
On the other hand, from the perspective of revenue sources and structure, the shift to on-chain liquidity staking tokens to share Launchpools revenue exposure has allowed the BNB ecosystem to form its own unique style of "BNB characteristic re-staking".
In the case of ETH and Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum creates revenue by "selling" network security to future AVS chains through EigenLayer in exchange for AVS airdrops, and uses two layers of products, liquidity pledge and re-pledge, to stack intermediate revenue and gameplay. This model performed well during the market upswing at the beginning of the year, and attracted many public chain ecosystems to follow suit. However, the entire revenue chain is heavily dependent on the development of EigenLayer, which is also the main reason why Ethereum has once again fallen into a revenue and scenario crisis when Eigen's stamina is insufficient - re-pledge cannot prove the sustainability of revenue.
In contrast, Binance Launchpools and other products are reliable income products that have been verified by time and the market. Through ListaDAO and BNB.xyz, the BNB ecosystem creates income through regular airdrops of Binance income products, and uses liquidity staking to add additional on-chain income. This makes BNB a more reliable and sustainable income model than re-staking when it is an L1 native token in the same ecological niche as ETH. From the perspective of the development of the public chain ecosystem, this is definitely a trump card for the future of BNB Chain.
The L1 token trial has just begun
The fragile value capture link of L1 tokens has always been a lingering shadow for many public chain teams. In the 2021-2022 cycle alone, two major projects have failed to overcome this problem. Polkadot's high-cost and inefficient slot auction mechanism has led to the loss of a large number of developers and projects, and eventually the ecosystem has lost its vitality, and the use scenarios and demand for DOT have also decreased; Cosmos advocates an inclusive multi-chain universe path, but although the CosmosSDK has been widely adopted by the industry, the Cosmos Hub-centered concept is difficult to capture value due to the excessive autonomy of the SDK chain, and is now gradually withdrawing from the center of the stage.
Many people did not expect that Ethereum has gone the furthest on the road of shared security. After experiencing the application explosion in 2017 and the new public chain crisis in 2021, Ethereum's value model has gradually transformed from a "world computer" for C to a "block maker" for B, hoping to create higher enterprise-level demand and value for Ethereum's blocks with the security of its own network. Eigen Layer is a typical case. However, the continuous decline in network DA costs is reducing the momentum of this narrative. At the same time, Solana's nirvana has caused "application anxiety" in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the entire ecosystem has fallen into a dilemma of "To be or not to be".
In contrast, Solana's development is more like that of a startup. For now, Solana is not concerned with the value capture of SOL itself, but rather stacking a large number of application scenarios, attracting users and traffic, and realizing its vision of "Nasdaq on the chain" through meme casinos. Solana's core value logic seems to be that when the ecosystem has enough application scenarios and a strong enough network effect, the value capture of SOL itself will come from the average holdings required for users to participate in the ecosystem. In terms of performance and sustainability, this indirect value model has indeed worked.
As mentioned above, in this cycle and in the following years, an important logic for the development of public chains is to find a value model that suits them and build an ecological moat around it. With the launch of BNB.xyz, BNB Chain has also found a unique value model for itself. By integrating the liquidity and revenue channels of the Binance platform, BNB Chain seems to have opened up a new situation for ecological development. For BNB holders, this once again confirms what I said: "Working for BNB Holders."
