BNB Chain Aims to Double Transaction Speed, Targets ZK Tooling in 2023 Road Map

BNB Chain, the world’s largest smart-contract blockchain in terms of transaction volume and daily active users, plans to make what it called significant improvements in performance, scalability, security, decentralization and infrastructure this year, according to a technical road map shared with CoinDesk.

The changes include upgrades to Web3 applications, a communication layer on-chain to provide real-time tech support for developers and users, and a way of unlocking new privacy use cases from a regulatory and compliance perspective.

"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,” said Alvin Kan, BNB Chain's director of growth.

EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine, is the native processing system that allows developers to create smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. ZK refers to the zero-knowledge proof protocol used for data encryption.

BNB Chain, originally known as Binance Smart Chain, comprises BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain (BSC). Since it started in September 2020 it has processed more than 3 billion transactions from 200 million unique addresses.

As part of the 2023 road map, BNB Chain said it aims to more than triple the number of validators to 100 from 29. Validators will have greater on-chain governance so that they can influence the direction of the network and its rules.

The blockchain plans to increase its throughput from 140 million gas limit and 2,200 transactions per second (TPS) to 300 million gas limit and 5,000 TPS. The term gas limit refers to the maximum price a cryptocurrency user is willing to pay when sending a transaction or performing a smart contract function.

BNB Chain said it will add Optimistic rollups to support a wider variety of uses in the ecosystem. An Optimistic rollup is an approach to scaling that involves moving computation and state storage away from the blockchain and are designed to make transactions cheaper and faster.