Witnessing explosive growth over the last year, BNB Chain — formerly Binance Smart Chain — has solidified its position as the third most popular DeFi ecosystem, with close to $12 billion in assets held in its most successful DeFi protocols.
BNB Chain is a combiniation of Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain, and now stands for “Build and Build,” instead of Binance Coin. Benefiting from extremely high throughput, low transaction fees, and fast transaction completion times, BNB Chain is widely considered to be a low-cost alternative to Ethereum, and there are now well over one thousand projects and tokens already deployed on the platform.
In this article, we’re taking a look at the 7 best projects on BNB Chain, a high-speed Go Ethereum fork and smart contract platform that was designed to be efficient, accessible, and immediately familiar to most cryptocurrency users.
1. Binance Coin (BNB)
By far the most popular asset on BNB Chain is the platform’s native token known as Binance Coin, or BNB. Initially a simple utility token for the Binance exchange platform, Binance Coin saw its utility and popularity skyrocket from 2020 onwards with the launch of the BNB Chain blockchain.
The token now has more than 1.5 million holders across the BNB Chain and Ethereum ecosystems, and has a wide variety of use cases; including fee discounts on Binance, paying for transaction fees on BNB Chain, making in-store payments, and more. But more than this, Binance Coin was one of 2021’s best-performing cryptocurrencies, netting holders a staggering 1,280% profit last year alone.
2. PancakeSwap
Despite its whimsical name, PancakeSwap is by far the most popular dApp on BNB Chain. Now, it comes with an entire suite of DeFi applications, including a decentralized exchange, yield farms, prediction markets, an NFT marketplace, and more.
The platform stands heads and shoulders above other DEXes on BNB Chain as far as trading volume is concerned — with the PancakeSwap regularly clocking in more than half a billion dollars in daily trading volume. With over 4 million monthly users, PancakeSwap has dramatically exceeded expectations and is now one of the most successful projects currently running on BNB Chain.
The native asset for the platform, known as CAKE, has a wide variety of use cases but does suffer from relatively high inflation since it is one of the primary reward tokens for participants in its PancakeSwap’s yield farms.
3. Chainlink
As an oracle provider, Chainlink allows blockchain-based projects to easily integrate data feeds from off-chain sources, which might include IoT sensors, stock markets, centralized databases, and more. This data can then be fed into smart contracts, helping to power and secure a huge range of decentralized applications and services, including exchanges, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets.
Its two-way oracles also allow traditional businesses and databases to receive data from decentralized blockchains, helping to deliver the benefits of blockchain to the real world. Originally launched on Ethereum, Chainlink has also integrated with BNB Chain and a variety of other blockchains, and its native asset, known as LINK can be bridged to BNB Chain using a standard token bridge.
4. Venus
Billed as a decentralized money market and stablecoin protocol, Venus provides an open marketplace for lenders and borrowers — allowing users to earn interest on their BNB Chain assets by contributing them to decentralized lending pools. On the flip side, borrowers can take out a loan in a wide variety of different assets by putting down sufficient collateral, all with no credit checks or long documentation to fill out.
It also offers a fully decentralized stablecoin known as VAI, but this has so far struggled to maintain its peg at $1. Venus was one of the first projects to launch on Binance Launchpool — allowing users to stake their BNB, BUSD, and SXP tokens to farm XVS tokens over a 30-day period. And as of this video going live, it’s the second-largest dApp on BNB Chain by total value locked, with more than $1.4 billion worth of assets locked in the protocol.
5. Baby Doge Coin
Launched in June 2021, Baby Doge Coin is slated to be an enhanced version of the ever-popular Dogecoin. The token is currently one of the most widely distributed assets on BNB Chain, with over 1.3 million holders. It has also been promoted in some pretty high profile places, including on renowned Nascar driver Brandon Brown’s custom-wrapped No. 68 Chevrolet Camaro, as well as a popular tweet by tech pioneer and famed meme-coin lover Elon MuskThough Baby Doge Coin is a hyper-deflationary meme coin, the project also supports a wide variety of charities and dog rescue initiatives.
6. Swipe
One of the most ambitious projects on this list, given that it aims to improve the spendability and utility of cryptocurrencies while providing a crucial on-ramp to the industry. The platform offers a variety of crypto-related services, including a popular multi-asset wallet and a white label debit card issuance solution — which is already being used by several blockchain industry titans, including Binance and FTX.
Swipe was taken over by Binance in December last year after the tech giant moved from majority ownership to sole ownership of the company as part of its plans to expand the availability of its services. The platform’s native token, known as SXP, recently became the second most mentioned cryptocurrency on Twitter after Bitcoin in Nov. 2021 and is primarily used to unlock access to higher tier debit cards with improved features — like cashback and freebies.
7. CryptoBlades
CryptoBlades slashes its way into eighth place on our list. If there’s one niche that really took 2021 by storm, it is play-to-earn gaming. By promising to reward players in the form of cryptocurrency tokens for their in-game efforts and successes, play to earn projects became incredibly popular in 2021, and literally, dozens of P2E games are now up and running.
But few managed to garner more attention than CryptoBlades — arguably the most popular P2E game on BNB Chain. As a blockchain-powered role-playing game, CryptoBlades leverages the speed and efficiency of BNB Chain to allow players to own and leverage their assets, including characters and weapons, to earn an income by playing.
Since all in-game assets take the form of NFTs, owners are free to sell or trade them as they see fit on the CryptoBlades marketplace. The game recently launched its PvP open beta, allowing players to battle one another and put their equipment to the test in a variety of combat situations.
