Analyzing BNB Greenfield: Is It Undervalued?
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Analyzing BNB Greenfield: Is It Undervalued?
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Author: Linnn
Decentralized storage is on the rise!
On February 17, HQHan.eth, Growth Lead at Filecoin, tweeted that Filecoin, a decentralized storage project, will launch smart contracts on March 23, becoming a mature Layer1 blockchain.
On February 14, Binance founder CZ stated during a Twitter AMA that most people underestimate the potential of BNB Greenfield. It will open new use cases for BNB in data storage, and more people will realize its market impact once it launches.
BNB Greenfield is the third chain within the BNB ecosystem—following BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain—as a decentralized storage public chain.
This article explores why decentralized storage needs smart contracts, examines BNB Greenfield’s features, and evaluates its potential.
Why Decentralized Storage Needs Smart Contracts
Let’s start with a blunt conclusion: decentralized storage is a crucial cornerstone for Web3.0 development.
After all, an industry championing "decentralization" still relies heavily on traditional cloud providers like AWS for infrastructure—users must pay tolls just to pass through.
But as the saying goes, “An NFT hosted on a centralized server isn’t a truly decentralized NFT.” Projects that only offer a façade of decentralization without fully decentralized underlying storage cannot be considered pure Web3 projects.
Compared to centralized storage, decentralized storage ensures immutability and trustlessness while enabling data persistence and censorship resistance.
Now you might ask, why not store data directly on the respective public blockchain?
Storing data directly on blockchains is extremely expensive—that's why blockchains primarily handle transaction data. Moreover, on-chain storage is inefficient and limited by block size constraints.
So we need decentralized storage networks: they allow data to be stored decentrally without being placed directly on smart contract platforms. This has led to the emergence of distributed storage projects such as Storj, Sia, Arweave, and Filecoin.
Currently, these decentralized storage systems mainly support static storage—for example, articles, videos, or NFT images—but lack native smart contracts and computational capabilities. Without programmability between data points, DApps requiring frequent data interaction and computation (such as many GameFi and SocialFi projects) cannot effectively utilize these networks.
This creates an awkward situation: in terms of storage efficiency and cost-effectiveness, decentralized solutions can't compete with traditional cloud providers; when it comes to computing power, they are virtually non-existent. As a result, despite strong narratives, clear demand, and promising prospects, decentralized storage struggles with real-world adoption and underperforms in the market.
To break this bottleneck and unlock greater potential, decentralized storage must integrate smart contracts to deliver intelligent and dynamic storage solutions with broader use cases:
1. Perform computations directly within the data storage environment, eliminating the need to transfer data;
2. Build smarter storage markets, enabling dynamic pricing based on time, replication level, or regional availability;
3. Establish tokenized economic models for data storage and create Data DAOs;
4. Enable native NFT storage where content coexists with the registry tracking it;
5. Achieve interoperability via cross-chain bridges, integrating with DApps on other chains and providing storage services.
……
Therefore, I revise my initial statement: decentralized storage equipped with smart contracts is the true foundation supporting Web3.0 development.
It is precisely against this backdrop that BNB Greenfield emerged—a platform combining both decentralized storage and computation.
Decoding BNB Greenfield
On February 1, the BNB Greenfield whitepaper was officially released. My definition: BNB Greenfield is a sidechain of BNB Chain capable of synchronously delivering decentralized storage and computation.
Three keywords stand out: storage, computation, and BNB Chain sidechain—these represent the three core characteristics of BNB Greenfield.
First, the foundational function of BNB Greenfield is distributed storage.
For instance, using BNB Greenfield, anyone with a BNB Chain address and holding BNB can:
1. Seamlessly store their data on BNB Greenfield, much like using Dropbox;
2. Deploy a website in minutes without going through registration or credit card binding processes;
3. Programmatically manage their data using interfaces similar to AWS S3;
4. Store historical data from BNB Smart Chain and other infrastructure data across the BNB ecosystem.
Whether Web2 or Web3, storage remains a fundamental requirement. From the outset, BNB Greenfield has been designed to serve the vast Web2 market by adopting widely used APIs. Storage providers will charge fees in USD, though payments will still be settled in BNB.
Second, BNB Greenfield’s revolutionary aspect lies in its compatibility with smart contracts, bringing programmable computation.
There's a consensus in the blockchain world: data itself is an asset. Yet for individuals, data trapped in centralized, static storage cannot be monetized—it remains mere data rather than tradable assets.
BNB Greenfield changes this by allowing smart contracts to interact with users’ own data assets. Ownership and read permissions can be managed financially via EOA wallets on the BNB Smart Chain through NFTs, ensuring individuals truly own their data while making it tradable and赋予 financial attributes.
Take the whitepaper’s example: when an author uploads an e-book to a decentralized storage network, currently that network serves merely as a decentralized tool.
In reality, this e-book contains multiple rights—copyright, reproduction rights, film adaptation rights—all intangible assets capable of generating revenue. Traditional storage chains alone cannot tokenize these rights. Here, BNB Greenfield steps in: “Come here—not only do we store your work, but we also enable you to sell it directly via smart contracts on BNB Smart Chain and earn money.”
Concretely, authors can encapsulate their novels on Greenfield, map them onto BSC, then tokenize access rights into tokens or NFTs on BSC. Only users who purchase these tokens/NFTs with BNB gain access to the novel file—thus transforming stored data into income-generating assets.
Another key use case is decentralized social media.
A major challenge facing current decentralized social protocols is how to store social data. Obviously, storing everything on-chain isn’t feasible. Most adopt hybrid models—recording identity on-chain and storing data off-chain.
BNB Greenfield offers a new possibility for decentralized social platforms.
Users can own and store their social graphs in a decentralized manner on BNB Greenfield, while different front-end social apps provide convenient networking experiences. Fan and subscriber relationships can be managed through token economies enabled by smart contracts.
I personally believe—albeit subjectively—that decentralized social media will become a highly strategic focus area for Binance in the future.
Finally, BNB Greenfield should not be seen as an independent “storage blockchain” competing head-on with Filecoin or Arweave. Instead, it should be understood within the broader BNB Chain ecosystem, serving the demands and traffic from BNB Smart Chain.
A native cross-chain bridge connects Greenfield and BSC—their synergy enables success. BNB Smart Chain supplies project resources and user traffic, while BNB Greenfield helps BSC-based projects improve cloud storage, unlocks utility and financialization opportunities for stored data, and enables programmable data ownership.
All for BNB
When analyzing Binance’s moves, I often fall into two mental traps:
One, Binance attempts to occupy nearly every possible ecological niche—never wanting to miss out;
Two, every initiative ultimately aims to empower BNB. To this day, I still remember co-founder He Yi’s declaration years ago: “BNB > Binance.”
With Greenfield’s launch, Binance promoted the slogan: One Token, Three Chains.
BNB Greenfield does not issue a new native token but continues to use BNB as its core token—one token powering three blockchains.
Going forward, the three BNB Chain public chains will link three distinct blockchain worlds, forming a cohesive ecosystem:
1. BNB Beacon Chain, built on Cosmos-SDK, connects to the Cosmos ecosystem via IBC;
2. BNB Smart Chain, EVM-compatible, integrates with other EVM-compatible chains and Layer2 solutions;
3. BNB Greenfield, a Proof-of-Stake chain based on Tendermint consensus, combines smart contracts with decentralized storage.
Under BNB Greenfield’s economic model, users rent storage space paying in BNB; nodes secure the chain and earn BNB; storage providers also receive BNB as income. In the future, additional node services and staking mechanisms could further drive demand for BNB lending and financial products.
The vision seems expansive, yet when BNB Greenfield launched, the market response was lukewarm. Partly due to competing narratives like Nostr, LSD, and AI capturing attention, but fundamentally, I believe the muted reaction stems from inherent traits of the “storage” sector itself.
Decentralized storage is a slow-burning, behind-the-scenes “long-term business.” Moreover, it doesn’t constitute a standalone vertical—it functions more like middleware (e.g., Chainlink), dependent on external demand surges to drive growth.
For example, in 2021, Arweave saw significant growth in secondary market activity and stored data volume—largely fueled by standout applications like Mirror and the popularity of Solana NFTs, many of which chose Arweave for storage. Metaplex, Solana’s NFT minting platform, even made Arweave its default storage solution.
Thus, the entire storage sector remains in a waiting phase: first, awaiting the official rollout of smart-contract-enabled decentralized storage networks like BNB Greenfield and FEVM—infrastructure maturation is step one; second, waiting for application breakthroughs that generate real demand—an inflection point or hot narrative to ignite the space.
Build the nest, attract the phoenix—it’s time!
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