How Ankr’s Cutting-Edge Web3 Infrastructure Eliminated BNB Chain’s Scalability Issues

Ankr (ANKR) has revealed that its first set of open-source performance improvement operations on Binance’s BNB Chain in the fall of 2021 had an enormous impact on the blockchain network, much higher than the initial expectations of both parties.

Ankr Making Life Easier for Blockchain & Web3 Projects

Ankr (ANKR), one of the world’s fastest-growing Web3 infrastructure providers that functions as an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) provider of dozens of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and Web3.0 ecosystems, has detailed how its expertise and contributions to the BNB Chain network upgrade in 2021, has significantly boosted the blockchain’s performance. 

Since that time, Ankr says it has successfully carried out several open-source performance improvements that completely overhauled the BNB Chain network, resulting in a 10x increase in RPC request throughput, 75 percent reduction in storage requirements, a sync process that’s 100x faster, and an “entirely new framework for scaling the blockchain’s operations with application-specific sidechains.”

Samy Karim, BNB Chain’s Ecosystem Coordinator said:

“Ankr is a key infrastructure provider for the BNB Chain ecosystem – their contributions and expertise were critical in implementing upgrades to the BNB Chain with the Erigon client, rewriting Archive Node infrastructure, and creating a framework for BNB Application Sidechains. This allows the BNB Chain ecosystem to remain competitive and offer both users and builders the latest benefits.”

 A Complex Task 

Ankr has revealed that it first discovered the loopholes and inefficiencies of the BNB Chain way before it heard calls for an improvement of the blockchain network, as it’s BNB’s predominant RPC provider and one of BNB Chain’s 21 node validators.

According to the team, at the time, the resolution of the bottlenecks present in the network proved quite a complex and elusive task, that even Ankr’s seasoned devs, who were highly experienced with BSC ops, had “difficulty staying at block height as it experienced extreme traffic volumes,” due to the fact that BSC was the preferred choice for dApp and games developers, thanks to its meager fees and high throughput.

Once the problems were discovered and an agreement between the Ankr and the BNB Chain teams was reached, the former immediately went to work and adopted a multi-pronged approach to boost the capacity of the BNB Chain, which included:

• The Erigon Performance Upgrade: Ankr says its engineering team somehow discovered that by implementing the Erigon client, they could significantly improve the network in terms of storage capacity and synchronization time requirements. “Ankr successfully implemented a version of Erigon for the BNB Chain that solved scalability issues and made the new version of Erigon for the BSC, open-source and available to all,” the team noted.
• BNB Application Sidechains (BAS): building upon the success of the Erigon performance upgrade, Ankr says it then made a proposal for a total upgrade of the protocol. The team then formulated a multi-chain scaling solution that was robust enough to handle use cases like GameFi and others, unlike Ethereum’s current layer-2 solutions. 
• BAS dApp Launch: once the BAS application sidechains were successfully put in place, and working frictionlessly, Ankr proceeded to launch BAS dApps, including the Meta Apes game. “We provided our open-source gaming SDK that allowed the Meta Apes game studio to take an already-popular game, Age of Apes, and give it full Web3, blockchain, and crypto capabilities,” the team added.
• BNB Liquid Staking: finally, Ankr supported the BNB Chain network with the first BNB Liquid Staking solution, which effectively onboarded DeFi composability on top of staked BNB tokens. This way, BNB holders will have more options on how to earn rewards on DeFi protocols with their assets.

Going forward, Ankr has made it clear that it will continue to support the BNB Chain ecosystem in terms of upgrades, network security improvements, cross-chain interoperability, and more.