In recent years, various sectors of the blockchain industry have been closely focused on public chains and DeFi. Since 2021, various public chain projects have emerged one after another. Recently, due to the popularity of NFTs and GameFi, the competition among public chains has once again been pushed to the forefront.
What are the mainstream types of public chains currently?
In addition to general-purpose smart contract public chains like Ethereum (ETH) and platform public chains like NEO, major centralized exchanges have also developed their own public chains to enter the DeFi field. The main representatives of these exchange public chains are Binance's BSC (Binance Smart Chain, also known as BNB Chain), OKEx's OKC (OK Chain), KuCoin's KCC (KuCoin Community Chain), etc.
The explosion and even proliferation of the number of public chains are mainly due to the drawbacks of high latency and high transaction fees of ETH. Users are eagerly waiting for a low-latency, high-performance public chain that can replace it. So, is it easy to build a public chain? Yes and no. Technically speaking, with the help of various development tools, the difficulty of building a public chain is much lower than before. When the public chain starts to run, a series of "hardware" and "software" needs to be built to support the ecosystem of the public chain, such as wallets, computing devices, projects, native tokens, etc.
Therefore, in emerging public chain projects, exchange public chains like BSC, OKC, and KCC have natural advantages. Because the quality of tokens determines the competitiveness of public chains.
What are the mainstream exchange-based public chains?
1. Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
BSC (Binance Smart Chain) is a public chain developed by the leading exchange Binance in September 2020. Apart from its fast transaction speed, it is perfectly compatible with EVM, which allows ETH and other tokens to interact with BSC. Besides, with the addition of staking proof of authority, transaction fees are significantly reduced and transaction speeds are faster.
Within 16 months of its launch, BSC has successfully deployed hundreds of projects and processed over 2.34 billion transactions from 130 million active addresses. After the “trial operation” stage in 2020, the core team realized that "one chain" cannot cover all aspects, so they decided to develop two basic infrastructures, BSC Application Side Chain (BAS) and BSC Partition Chain (BPC), to realize the vision of "operating at the crossroads of decentralized blockchain future".
In 2021, a variety of projects emerged on BSC that achieved the transformation of multi-chain and cross-chain, especially in the DeFi field, such as the leading DEX (Decentralized Exchange) Pancakeswap and the lending protocol Venus. Thus, to learn about popular projects on Binance Smart Chain, you definitely can't miss Pancakeswap. As the largest decentralized exchange on Binance Smart Chain, it has diverse functions, including the simplest exchange and liquidity mining and various innovative features.
When it comes to Pancakeswap, it is necessary to mention its native token, CAKE. Since its issuance, the price of CAKE has skyrocketed and hit a historical high in May 2021, helping Pancakeswap become the best-performing DEX on BSC. However, since then, the price of CAKE has been in a long-term downtrend and fell to $2.37 in June 2022. Looking back over the past four months, the price trend of it shows a V-shaped recovery in daily time frame charts. This type of recovery reflects a strong and rapid growth momentum after a period of decline. With the support of increasing trading volume, this bull market indicates a sustained rebound. However, the price has stalled at the local resistance level of $4.62, because some sellers are actively defending this price, posing a threat to a temporary pullback in CAKE price. Currently, the situation does not seem suitable for speculation.
2. OK Chain (OKC)
OKC (OK Chain) is a public chain platform launched by OKEx on January 15, 2021. It is a high-performance, highly scalable, secure, and reliable blockchain infrastructure designed to support the development and deployment of decentralized applications (DApps) for enterprises and developers.
As a public chain of a top 10 global cryptocurrency exchange platform, OKC's underlying technology is based on the Cosmos public chain architecture. Cosmos is a completely open-source decentralized public chain that has been well-known for its cross-chain technology and applications due to its unique architectural design. Therefore, OKC based on Cosmos public chain technology has attracted a large number of developers and users since its launch.
According to official data, as of the end of 2021, more than 20 DApps are running in its ecosystem on OK Chain, covering various fields including DeFi, NFT, games, social media, and more. Some well-known DApps include OKExChainSwap, MXC Exchange, Cash Tech, BigBang Game, and more.
However, DeFiBox (formerly known as OKLink) has stood out from many DApps. It is a decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem platform that provides users with a range of DeFi applications, including liquidity mining, flash swaps, borrowing, and more. BOX is the core token issued by DeFiBox on OKC, mainly used for liquidity mining rewards, transaction fees, and governance voting. As the brightest newcomer on OKC, BOX's price rose rapidly at the beginning of 2022 and reached its historical high in March. However, its performance was unstable throughout 2022 and early 2023, with multiple significant fluctuations in price. Even though the DeFiBox team continuously launches new products and services, expanding the platform's application scenarios and user base, the price of BOX is still highly volatile and not suitable for speculation. It is expected that the price of BOX will have a slight increase in the future, but its price volatility is still high at present.
3. KuCoin Community Chain (KCC)
KCC (KuCoin Community Chain) is the exchange public chain of KuCoin, one of the largest decentralized exchanges in the world, and one of the hottest public chain projects recently. High stability and security are the characteristics of this exchange public chain, while low gas fees and high speed are effective guarantees for the prosperity of its ecosystem. Since its launch on June 16, 2021, KCC has maintained a continuous growth pace. Despite the overall down-treading market environment, the number of independent addresses on the chain increased from 100,000 in mid-2022 to nearly 600,000 at year-end, with an increase of more than 500%.
According to official data, since KCC announced its $50 million ecosystem incentive plan last year, more than 100 projects have been successfully deployed on the chain, including DeFi, NFT, GameFi, Web 3.0 Infrastructure, and other sectors. Especially in the DeFi field, new projects such as OpenLeverage, KuSwap, sKCS, and Torches have emerged in just one year. It can be seen that after the infrastructure development period in 2022, the KCC ecosystem track has gradually improved and will provide more diverse KCS usage scenarios, enriching users' on-chain experience and arbitrage space.
However, currently, leading on-chain projects in various fields are still scarce. It is reported that KCC stated in its public letter at the end of 2022 that it will increase support for developers. Combined with the previously announced incentive plans, it is expected that in 2023, KCC may focus on ecosystem development, which may bring new innovative products and exposure growth.
As a public chain that has been committed to transforming blockchain technology and culture from geeks to the public, KCC often publicly expresses its understanding of developers in the cold start stage and is never stingy in supporting and cultivating high-quality projects. Backed by the leading exchange platform, KuCoin, KCC has the most advanced technical support and unique advantages, so it supports various outstanding developers to update codes and technologies, always maintaining activity and leadership.
In the recent ETH Denver, KCC jointly held the KuCoin Builder House with KuCoin, KuCoin Labs, and KuCoin Ventures. As a strong backing behind KCC, KuCoin's support for KCC is no longer ambiguous, hoping to provide shelter for users and developers in the bear market through their joint efforts. KuCoin and KCC have also not announced any new chain plans, as KCC will be the only focus of KuCoin in the decentralized field as the only public chain.
In addition, unlike other exchange public chains, KCC is also an important part of the KCS ecosystem, so KCS is the only fuel and key pass on the chain. KCS, as the only native token of the KuCoin platform, also has great potential. As the DeFi market on KCC maintains a growing trend, the price of KCS will also increase further, and the more prosperous KCS ecosystem will also benefit KCC, making it continue to grow and attract more developers and users to participate.
According to the latest news, in order to create a better development environment for on-chain projects and provide more ecological support, KCC officially opens the project registration channel for the KCC Gas Revenue Program. Successfully registered projects will enjoy the KCC gas refund service from March 15 and the return ratio can reach up to 100%. Gas Revenue will lower the build cost of KCC on-chain projects and encourage more developers to deploy contracts on KCC.
In 2023, KCC will further improve the performance and scalability of the chain, and continue to incubate more simple and rewarding projects and activities. Although KCC's ecosystem is relatively new, its number of users and transaction volume continue to steadily increase. As the ecosystem continues to grow, KCC may become one of the important ecosystems in the blockchain field.
