12 Must-Know Items For Intelligent Binance Smart Chain Investors
--
The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is currently the third-largest decentralized chain based upon total value locked ($12.9B TVL) and the second-largest chain based upon the number of protocols (372). It launched in September 2020 and instantly gained popularity because of its Ethereum virtual machine compatability, but with lower fees and faster transactions. BSC can achieve these benefits by having more centralization. There are 21 validators on BSC while Ethereum has over 275,000 validators.
Below are items every investor on the Binance Smart Chain should know about, beginning with some of the basics and moving towards more advanced features. The idea here is to provide valuable information for new experienced investors.
- Setting up the Binance Smart Chain on your Metamask wallet should take less than 5 minutes. Here’s a great article with detailed instructions.
- BNB is the native token for the Binance Smart Chain. The BNB must be configured for BSC for it to transfer properly to your Metamask wallet to be used for gas (transaction fees). The easiest way to get BNB to your Metamask wallet configured for BSC is to transfer the BNB directly from your Binance account and select the BSC option. There are no fees for transferring BNB or BUSD from your Binance account to the BSC.
- The biggest decentralized exchange on BSC is https://pancakeswap.finance. If you are familiar with Uniswap, SushiSwap, or other AMMs, it functions the same way. PancakeSwap is the most used decentralized app in the decentralized finance space. Trades typically cost less than $1.00 worth of BNB gas fees. This is much cheaper than Ethereum.
- If you are looking for a token contract ID to add a token to your Metamask or to trade on PancakeSwap, you can look it up by visiting https://bscscan.com and typing in the token name next to all filters.
You select the token and it will take you to a page like this.
