According to Arcane Research’s Summary of 2021 in Crypto report, Binance Coin (BNB) had a stellar year marked with a 1,344% gain. While Bitcoin and Ethereum also ended the year in the black, their respective returns of 73% and 455% were anemic by comparison. All are currently ranked in the top four projects by market capitalization: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), and Binance Coin.
It’s important to note that BNB is the native coin of the largest crypto trading exchange by volume in the world, Binance, and of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The BSC platform enables smart contracts, which are necessary for DeFi services and it has low-cost transactions. Those low fees have helped siphon market share away from the current smart contract market leader – the Ethereum blockchain.
Earlier this year, the Ethereum blockchain handled more than 95% of NFT and DeFi transactions. However, the Ethereum network still has scalability and congestion issues that won’t be resolved until upgrades to the blockchain are in place with the rollout of ETH 2.0.
Given the current limitations on the Ethereum blockchain, it has had difficulty keeping up with the network volume demands from the record-setting growth of NFT and DeFi transactions. As a result, the ETH blockchain allows users to “bid up” the fees to complete a transaction, which have been as high as $100-$200 range to complete a purchase during peak periods.
Those costs have anecdotally been higher than the value of the actual NFT asset or DeFi transaction itself. The Arcane report cited that the average transaction fee on Ethereum was $21, while it was $3 for Bitcoin fees. Other blockchains such as Binance’s, Solana, Polygon, Energi, and others have fees that are as low as a few pennies.
Despite its impressive run-up last year, and based on its current market capitalization, BNB still has room to run and could still see additional gains of 3-5x in 2022 but this is not financial advice and you should always do your own research.
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