From DeFi to GamingFi, Why is BSC Always the “Hot Spot”?

Key Points: With DeFi, NFT and GamingFi, BSC knows how to keep its developers and users on board 

Recently, the wealth effect created by Axie Infinity has brought Play-to-Earn GamingFi products to the spotlight, which was last shed on “animal coins”.

Q2 of 2021 was like a roller-coaster ride to the crypto market, but the blockchain industry hasn’t stopped its foray into the future. 

Axie Infinity revealed the feasibility of GamingFi to idle capital on the market. Now it seems the history is repeating itself: users who missed this opportunity are flooding into the friendlier BSC, looking for some substitute of Axie due to market delay. 

According to BSCScan, on July 30 there were nearly 14 million transactions executed throughout BSC, another new ATH since May 14.

BSCDaily data has shows an exponential growth of GamingFi users on BSC.

In fact, BSC had achieved successful rollouts in the DeFi and the NFT rides before GamingFi became a hit. It can be safely said that BSC has always been THE place to go for fast, secure and cost-efficient blockchain interactions for developers and users.

I. The DeFi trend

As liquidity mining, a trend initiated by Compound ignited the market, the “Season of DeFi” steered by Ethereum secured a blast in 2020.

However, by the end of 2020, high cost and congestion problems began to bother Ethereum, and developers and users turned around and looked for friendlier public chain ecosystems. Binance Smart Chain (BSC) was the first to challenge the leading position of Ethereum.

With a $100 million fund and the support of the world’s largest crypto exchange – Binance, BSC embarked on a rapid expansion of its DeFi ecosystem. 

The BSC is designed with two things in mind: to ensure high performance and low transfer fee, and to be compatible with EVM, so as to secure rapid access to BSC by the massive number of Ethereum developers. The two “catalysts” combined with BSC’s resolution to develop DeFi has attracted a large number of users that are eager to earn via BSC. 

According to Messari, till May 2021, the total locked value (TVL) on BSC Smart Contract Dapp has reached around 13% of that on Ethereum. 

According to DappRadar, BSC has a TVL of around $20 billion, nearly 1/3 that of Ethereum. 

AMM protocol PancakeSwap and lending protocol Venus, the two most successful DApps on BSC, attracted the largest amount of capital in 2021, are benchmarking Uniswap, an AMM unicorn on Ethereum, and Aave, a lending protocol with European compliance license. 

In June alone, PancakeSwap has attracted over 2.13 million unique active wallets, generating more than $863.5 billion of revenue during the same period of time. 

Although PancakeSwap remains a leader in the BSC DeFi ecosystem, trends have shown that the universal adoption of BSC-native protocols is worth more attention than TVL, which is no longer the driving force behind DeFi value propositions in the ecosystem.

In terms of TVL, Venus is the second largest dApp on BSC; Autofarm, Pancake Bunny, Biswap and ApeSwap are among the most widely used ones. In July, these protocols were able to power over 50,000 unique active wallets. 

Notably, most of the functions on these dApps can be combined across protocols or even other vertical domains, providing BSC with a complete and integrated ecosystem. Key cross-chain DeFi protocols such as Curve, 1inch, SushiSwap and Cream have also sufficiently expanded BSC’s DeFi ecosystem. 

II. The NFT ecosystem boom

In 2021, NFT as a new form of cryptocurrency became a hot topic overnight, in and outside the crypto circle. From the classic Lebron James dunking to the first tweet by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, to the moment when Everyday: the First 5000 Days, a digital work by crypto artist Beeple sold at $69.34 million, “everything can be NFTed” has become the slogan of the crypto community. 

Of course BSC didn’t let slip such a golden opportunity – it provided creators and traders with low fees and high speed, and built a great NFT ecosystem. 

To focus on the overall development, innovation and talent input to the NFT ecosystem, BSC launched MVB II, with the theme “the NFT Big Bang”. Until early June 2021, 356 projects have registered for the MVB II program, with a TVL of $1.8 billion.

On July 29, BSC announced the 10 winners of MVB II, which include some popular P2E blockchain games such as CryptoBlades, MyDeFiPet, MOBOX and X World Games. It is said that these projects will be awarded a $10,000 fund, QuickScan service from Certik, funding for a comprehensive auditing, and incubation opportunities. 

In less than a year after launch, BSC has seen highly diversified development of NFT.

According to BSCProject, there are over 650 projects on BSC, covering six vertical domains: digital art, gaming, metaverse, social media, NFT+DeFi, and infrastructure. 

And there are quite a few star projects from these areas. 

Dego Finance: as a DeFi+NFT project on BSC, Dego has brought us a brand new concept for a sustainable DeFi ecosystem by leveraging modularization design to combine different products for different use cases, such as governance, pledging, fee payment, etc. 

BakerySwap: a Marketplace project. It is an AMM protocol and has also become the first AMM+NFT platform on BSC.

It is worth mentioning that the #DiamondsAreForever series NFT blind box, a product by Maye Musk, mother of Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk and KODAK, was sold in seconds after launching on BakerySwap on June 24. 

III. GamingFi – the latest DeFi trend 

According to dAppRadar, GamingFi is seeing a huge momentum of growth in both user base and daily volume. 

4 of the top 10 games with the highest 24-hour volume are deployed on BSC, with CryptoBlades taking the lead, growing its user base by over 10 folds within a week, and its transaction volume by nearly 40 folds. 

However, GamingFi has not become a sensational hit on social media, nor has it accrued jaw-dropping data, compared with tens of millions of dollars in TVL during the DeFi liquidity mining rush last year.

Then there’s the threshold. DeFi has most of its thresholds on the usage side, such as how to use a wallet or a DEX, which could be solved once and for all. GamingFi sees a much higher threshold. 

Behind different games are the different characteristics of the public chains they are deployed to. 

For example, Flow sets its focus on NFT and game public chain, offering a medium level of development difficulty, with its ecosystem still in its cradle. Wax, another blockchain focused on gaming, is experiencing a flat market due to its developer censoring system. While other mainstream chains   push a huge amount of developers and users away with its extremely high Gas fee and extremely low network speed. 

In contrast, BSC  offers much better infrastructures of public chains, and is much more inclusive. 

In its 2021 roadmap, BSC officially announced its goal to become a cross-chain financial infrastructure and unlock the “Internet of value”. As one of the essential steps to achieve this goal, BSC is working to nurture a strong developer community to incubate and accelerate original innovation and developers of outstanding performance. 

A BSC spokesperson says: “we are a match-maker. That is to say, we will provide high quality infrastructure, services and guidance for high quality projects, offering them an opportunity of rapid verification of their growth and optimization models by leveraging the resources from BSC, acceleration funds, the Binance ecosystem and the community. ”

BSC has launched a Grant activity on HackerLink.io, a blockchain developer platform under DoraHacks. In this activity sponsored by the BSC ecosystem, developers from all over the world are encouraged to submit their projects to Hackerlink.io. Qualified participants include: protocols deployed on BSC, DeFi, DAO, NFT, wallet and other infrastructure, data analysis and visualization tools and communities. 

It is said that the Grant is aimed at attracting new “bloods” and promoting innovative development of the BSC ecosystem. So far, the BSC community has collected 2907.15 BNB (about $0.78 million) and has distributed the fund to 108 global developer projects, of which 92 are deployed on BSC.

It is worth noting that BSC has always been actively and passionately nurturing and supporting developers, through regular global hackathons, the Martian Initiative, the Learn & Earn Initiative…In order to foster a highly innovative developer community, the level of support given by BSC is unparalleled. 

In the face of frequent security incidents, BSC rolled out the “Priority ONE” bounty program with a prize pool of $10 million to encourage exposure of verifiable attacks or vulnerabilities, joining the community for the construction and maintenance of a safer BSC ecosystem. 

With the support from, Binance, BSC has funded and accelerated multiple projects over the past year. BSC’s fast, secure and cost-efficient ecosystem becomes  the go-to place for developers and users for a brighter future for GamingFi.