opBNB launches on mainnet: How did BNB react?

• opBNB was built on the OP stack and EVM compatible.
• Daily transaction and gas price data were in line with testnet results.

Binance [BNB], one of the largest blockchain companies in the world, added a new feather to its cap as it rolled out the mainnet of its much-awaited layer-2 (L2) network, opBNB.

Read Binance Coin’s [BNB] Price Prediction 2023-24

The development was part of the Binance’s broader vision to onboard the next one billion users to Web3.

A scaling solution for BNB Chain

Unlike most other L2 networks which cater to the Ethereum [ETH] base layer, opBNB would function to ease the burden of BNB Smart Chain.

The project is built on the OP stack, the software powering another prominent L2 blockchain, Optimism [OP]. Moreover, it’s an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chain, meaning that decentralized applications (dApps) from other EVM networks could be easily migrated without changing the code.

Like other L2s, opBNB aimed to provide significant enhancements in terms of transaction throughput and usage costs vis-à-vis the base layer.

Assessing the chain’s performance

The results from the nearly three-month-long testing phase yielded encouraging results, as per the BNB Chain team. More than 35 million on-chain transactions were executed, with a daily transaction range of 100,000-150,000.

Notably, it took just one second to produce a new block. On BNB Chain, for context, it took roughly three seconds. The transaction costs were also reported to have been significantly reduced, as low as $0.005 for each transfer, with L2 gas costs at 0.2 gwei.

On-chain data since the launch announcement corroborated the above claims. Notably, the transaction count jumped to 138,777 on 13 September.

Source: opBNBScan

Furthermore, the gas price was found to be in line with the aforementioned test phase results. Note that the average gas price on the BNB Chain was nearly 4x this value.

Source: opBNBScan

How much are 1,10,100 BNBs worth today?

No major impact on BNB

The launch of the L2 caused a temporary rip in the value of native coin BNB. According to CoinMarketCap, the coin jumped to $214, but retraced back to $212 at the time of publication, effectively nullifying the gains.

That being said, opBNB was a big addition to Binance’s ecosystem. Though not often immediately apparent, the benefits of technical advancements like these can have a positive impact on the asset in the long run.