opBNB has been released!

What does this BSC L2 developed based on OP Stack mean to BNB Chain and OP respectively?

What are the advantages and disadvantages compared to OP?

Where will the BNB Chain system go in the L2 era?

This article will give you an in-depth and easy-to-understand understanding of opBNB.

opBNB has provided relatively complete documentation. In terms of parameters, opBNB is equivalent to a fully enhanced version of Optimism, with faster speed and larger transaction capacity. This is mostly due to the fact that opBNB is the L2 of BSC. BSC is larger in capacity than ETH and faster than ETH in speed. It is not difficult to understand that the BSC version of OP also has these advantages over the ETH version of OP.

opBNB claims that by introducing optimizations on OP Stack, it can achieve a capacity of 4000+ TPS and a block time of 1 second, with a transfer transaction fee of less than $0.005. Comparing the current ETH L2 horizontally, it is found that it is about 1/10 of the level. As mentioned above, most of these benefit from the differentiated advantages of BSC over ETH. To put it bluntly, no matter how ETH L2 develops, BSC Fork can create a differentiated advantage.

This is a unique advantage of BSC L2. Coinbase, OKX and Bybit all claim to be ETH's L2, but they are unlikely to make much difference in terms of experience. After all, everyone is connected to ETH, and independent projects have first-mover advantages. If Coinbase still has the big pie of compliant fund entrance, it seems difficult for the other two companies to avoid fierce homogeneous competition.

If you inherit advantages, you will naturally inherit disadvantages. Although BSC is faster and cheaper than ETH, BSC, which uses DPOS and is strongly supported by CEX, naturally has a certain gap with ETH in the degree of decentralization.

However, at the L2 layer, the gap between opBNB and BSC is smaller than the gap between OP and ETH. After all, it seems that the BSC team will not add any risks to the sequencer compared to BSC, and OP's fraud proof did not handle this problem well, which does not seem to be a big problem for opBNB.

On the other hand, the assets on opBNB are naturally mainly bridged from BSC, and the assets on BSC are mostly bridged assets rather than native assets. They rely on the security of CEX, but BSC is already contacting USDT/USDC to issue native assets. .

If this problem can be solved, then there will be little disadvantage in terms of asset security. After all, the mainstream assets are BTC/ETH/USDT/USDC, and BTCB, the Bitcoin asset bridged by Binance, is also centralized compared to wBTC bridged by institutional Bitgo may have advantages in terms of security and trust.

The next challenge for opBNB is to build an ecosystem. Although BSC is the most active non-ETH L1, the gap with ETH ecosystem is widening rather than narrowing. The improvement in user experience brought by opBNB will help BNB Chain ecosystem to undertake projects such as Perp DEX that are sensitive to indicators such as speed and cost.

opBNB should have been developing some projects in its early stages. For example, there is a project that has deployed zkBridge on it (this name is quite interesting when put together with opBNB). It is estimated that its future development will mostly depend on the support of Binance.

In addition, according to BNB Chain's overall plan of "one game of chess for the whole chain", GreenField should most likely take over the important task of opBNB's data availability layer in the future. BNB Chain seems to be creating an "inner loop" system [familiar taste].

What does opBNB mean to op? After all, opBNB is powered by OP Stack. Let’s translate the official document of OP Stack in human language: OP Stack is an open source software that supports Optimism. OP has developed this set of tools to facilitate everyone to Fork OP. To put it bluntly, the current situation is not much different from that of Sushi Fork Uniswap.

Of course, since there are many chains using Op Stack, the compatibility and communication convenience between these chains must be better. OP has also drawn a SuperChain pie. However, considering that ATOM does not seem to be able to fully capture the development dividends of the Cosmos ecosystem, $OP naturally has this concern as well.

However, it is quite good for OP developers to start a second business in the future. After all, this will make the application scope of OP wider, and it will indeed make it easier for them to start a new business, issue coins, or lead other projects. In addition, for $OP, there is a hype narrative. This industry is probably more important than the fundamental narrative.

Summarize

opBNB is a faster, cheaper, and larger-capacity BSC version of OP. Its advantages are mostly derived from the differentiated advantages inherited from BSC relative to ETH. Asset security and ecology are still the main challenges facing opBNB. The former is already being solved and the latter is a bigger challenge. In the L2 era, the "differentiation advantage" will continue to be maintained due to BSC's differential advantage over ETH.

For OP, it will not bring direct benefits at present, but in the future there will be a narrative pie of SuperChain for the market to savor.