BNB Chain surpasses Ethereum in unique addresses despite crypto winter

The BNB Chain has seen its number of unique addresses on the blockchain grow significantly that the network now surpasses by that metric Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

In a blog post shared by the BNB Chain’s developers, they claim to be the “largest layer-1 blockchain in the world” because of the rise. BNB Chain has over 230 million unique addresses, surpassing the 217 million unique addresses seen on the Ethereum blockchain, data from a BNB Chain block explorer shows.

The Bitcoin network is still the largest Layer-1 blockchain in the world, with over 1 billion unique addresses on it. BNB Chain’s growth is nevertheless significant as it surpassed Ethereum, which has a much larger and more developed ecosystem.

“Our community has made remarkable strides in the development of blockchain technology. We launched BNB Sidechain, zkBNB, Binance Oracle, security initiatives such as AvengerDAO, among others,” said Alvin Kan, Director of Growth & Ops at BNB Chain. “This has resulted in faster transactions, lower costs, and extra capacity, giving builders the confidence to onboard a large number of users. The team at BNB Chain is committed to providing a secure and user-friendly platform for developers and users alike, marching towards our mission to onboard the next billion users to Web3.”

BNB Chain’s developers noted several other figures for the network. In May, it capped out at 9.8 million transactions per day, while in October, it reached 2.2 million daily active users (DAU). DAU on the network were defined as unique addresses interacting with smart contracts per day.

The network’s growth was attributed to a number of factors, such as the introduction of sidechains to further support resource-intense applications and other upgrades to improve network performance. The BNB Chain’s team also mentioned that it funded a builder grant and a $10 million incentive program for decentralized application (DApps) developers, who attracted more users through their creations.

Furthermore, the network launched the Avenger decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), an API that alerts BNB Chain users whenever they interact with contracts that were flagged as malicious.

BNB Chain’s native token (BNB) is regularly burned by the crypto exchange Binance. The token was initially sold in an initial coin offering (ICO) to fund Binance’s development; and Binance will use its revenue to burn tokens until its circulating supply drops to 100 million, as its whitepaper said.

In October, Binance announced that its latest quarterly BNB token burn saw it destroy more than 2 million tokens, worth over $575 million at the time.

According to Binance’s announcement, a total of 2,065,152.42 BNB tokens have been burned as part of the latest quarterly burn, with a total of 4,833.25 BNB coming from the exchange’s Pioneer Burn Program, in which Binance counts as burned BNB tokens that users have lost after mistakenly sending them to unrecoverable addresses, and cover their losses with BNB that was set to be burned.