bloXroute’s BDN Helps BSC Validators Improve P2P Network Connectivity
By: Eyal Markovich, Co-Founder & COO
In June 2021, bloXroute released the Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) support for Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in response to the growing demand for network improvement and DeFi frontrunning protection. The BDN is essential in helping BSC validators, node operators, dApps and traders reduce network latency, improve uptime and increase profit.
Starting with a small-scale pilot program, phase 1 of the BSC-BDN launch aimed to improve BSC network performance. After two months of running, we are excited to release the initial result of the pilot program: the BDN clearly helped BSC validators improve their P2P network connectivity!
What has bloXroute done for BSC so far?
We launched the first BDN in June 2019 in support of Ethereum and two years later we created a new version of BDN that’s compatible with the BSC protocol and employs the same technologies already proven on Ethereum. Its main goal is to speed up the sync of new blocks and transactions for BSC validators and node operators so that BSC can scale more easily.
We started a pilot program with three BSC validators in June 2021 with three objectives:
- Confirm the ease of use for validators
- Measure network performance improvements
- Gauge the interest of BSC traders in the BDN DeFi services
All three validators managed to complete the setup within a short period of time by simply adding the hosted BDN gateways as trusted peers to their nodes. Ever since then, these three validators have started to receive and propagate blocks through the BDN in addition to the P2P network. The latest result shows these validators have been propagating blocks 50–200 ms faster using the BDN compared to the P2P network. Such network improvement can be potentially translated into economic benefits such as increasing block reward and saving network investment. More importantly, this is just the beginning and the performance will continue to improve as more validators are added to the BDN.
Pilot program participant Ankr’s CTO Stanley Wu commented on his BDN experience, “Ankr started collaboration with bloXroute by using their BDN, which turns out to be very easy, and the setup only took us 5 minutes. 24 hours later, we started to keep track of stats related to our validator on its web portal, which matches our validator’s connectives and stabilities. Currently we are working with bloXroute on a private transaction solution and believe that we will have an excellent result for the public very soon.”
What do BSC traders think?
While running the pilot program with three validators, we have also seen an overwhelming interest from the BSC trader community. Since the program’s launch, over 30 new traders have signed up for the BSC-BDN service. We’re in the middle of gathering benchmark data and looking forward to sharing it with the public in a later post. Currently, around 75% of the mempool transactions are first being propagated by the BDN and this number is constantly growing as more traders and nodes connect with the BDN.
What’s next?
Improving BSC network performance is just the first step of our long-term commitment to the BSC community. For the next step, we are working closely with the BSC team and Ankr to create a Binance Evolution Proposal (BEP) for a private transaction solution that will address the frontrunning problems DeFi traders are facing on BSC. Once it’s deployed, it will not only help boost DeFi trading activities on BSC but also introduce additional revenue streams to BSC validators.
Meanwhile, we encourage all BSC validators to take advantage of the network improvement provided by the BDN. For the BDN onboarding process guidance, please visit www.bloXroute.com/BSC and get connected today!
About bloXroute Labs
Founded in early 2018, bloXroute is the first blockchain layer zero (aka network layer) scalability solution provider, backed by famous venture capitalists such as Flybridge, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Venture and Dragonfly Capital. bloXroute created a low latency relay network called the BDN to help blockchain protocols speed up blocks and transactions propagation.
The BDN has been deployed on Ethereum mainnet since June 2019. According to KeeperDao and F2Pool, the BDN can not only provide traders the most timely ETH mempool transaction updates, but also effectively help ETH mining pools reduce uncle rate. In 2020, bloXroute also became the first to launch the enterprise grade frontrunning protection service (aka private transactions) on Ethereum that is helping many DeFi traders dodge frontunning attacks and increase profit everyday. So far the BDN has been deployed on Ethereum, Polygon and BSC.
