Binance Chain has launched its mainnet and will execute mainnet swap on April 23rd, according to its announcement.
The world’s top-ranked crypto exchange, Binance, had announced the launch of its blockchain back in December 2018, in a tweet, where it said: “Binance is pushing for blockchain adoption and doing many things to help advancement of the industry. E.g. we will have the Binance chain ready in the coming months, on which millions of projects can easily issue tokens.”
The major crypto exchange has launched its own blockchain called Binance Chain which will provide the basis for the creation of Initial Coin Offering (ICO) tokens and cryptocurrencies. The Binance Chain blockchain network will be available for the public on April 23.
What will happen?
According to the announcement, on April 18, validators produced blocks with consensus from the genesis block, where Binance’s native coin, the Binance Coin (BNB) will be created. The initial total supply of the coin will be 200 million, with the first 5 million BNB allocated and deposited into an address owned by Binance.com, in order to convert the ERC20 BNB for existing owners.
Users will be able to convert their ERC20 BNB tokens to Binance Chain BNB (BEP2) on the Binance exchange. As more users convert ERC20 BNB to BNP, Binance will be releasing more BEP2 coins.
As the press release mentioned, “Binance Chain Explorer and Web Wallet will be available to selected partners and beta testing for live testing first, and will be open to public access around April 23, 2019.”
If users want to keep ERC20 BNB tokens, they can withdraw their BNB from Binance.com 364 accounts into an Ethereum wallet by 2am (UTC), April 23rd.
Leaving Ethereum
Tokens which have migrated from the Ethereum blockchain to the Binance Chain have seen a “major downfall” hours after their transfer. At the same time, however, on 19 April 2019, Mithril (MITH) moved its token to Binance Chain and saw a more than 50 percent price increase.
Responding to Mithril’s price increase, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said: “Well, guess how many projects will queue up for the token migration now?” However, the current events and falling prices might compromise future migrations if they’re looking for the price increase, only. Let’s see what exactly happened with the tokens that have already transferred.”
It remains to be seen whether prices will stabilize and whether Binance Chain is a threat to Ethereum.