Public Goods Landscape

Public goods entail a series of different products and services that are used by the majority of the ecosystem. These are required building blocks at the protocol layer, for example, decentralized storage, cross-chain bridging, identity solutions or wallets. Preferred criteria for Public Good projects are open-source, free-to-use and non-competitive (establishing win-win).

These applications/tools generate less or no direct revenue but they make the overall ecosystem stronger and provide reliable infrastructure for developers to build upon.

To use the analogy of L1s being nations, Public goods would comprise highways, water canals, energy systems etc. basically the infrastructure that enables efficiency and propels productivity to a larger audience. Public goods don't always add to the GDP of a nation but enable other businesses and services to operate which contributes to the GDP.

BNB Chain is prioritizing Public Goods to strengthen the foundational stack that can power DeFi and a Creator Economy.

Again using the Nation’s analogy, we are building a strong network of transportation and energy infrastructure that can make the financial districts (DeFi) accessible and capable of retaining the liquidity. A strong infrastructure and deep liquidity would become BNB’s core strength to accelerate its ‘Creator Economy’.

Creator Economy is a significant layer that would unlock the next wave of 10MM Web3 users.

Overview on BNB’s Public Goods Landscape:

BNB Chain is aggressively improving its backend tech stack and has proposed a new architecture for revamping the validator structure. The architecture would also be extended for sidechains and zk-rollups.

Meanwhile, BNB Chain has been building bridges with all major protocols and improving the architecture for multi-chain compatibility.

Nevertheless, the opportunities to strengthen BNB lie across the tech stack.

BNB Ecosystem Security related opportunities:

• Security is one of the key focus areas for the BNB ecosystem to instill resilience and antifragile characteristics. Here, are few of the direct opportunities to contribute:
• Auditing DAOs
• Decentralised auditing DAOs facilitates security audits in real-time. It is a community of security researchers/enthusiasts that support projects for vulnerability discovery.
• Security APIs/Toolkits
• Bug bounty platforms
• Bug bounty platforms like Imunify specific to the BNB ecosystem could encourage higher security standards and foster a strong community with security expertise.
• Security Reporting (like Rekt DAOs)
• Security reporting DAOs/startups share the incident case-studies and builds the awareness while educating on security intricacies.

BNB Ecosystem is serious about compliance and is determined to bring in the best practices and tools that can enhance trust, reliability and safety amongst the community.

Opportunities on Frontend:

The front-end consists of applications and tools that directly interface with end-users. For Web3 applications, wallets are the first step of interaction with a dApp. In the last few years, wallets have become mature in design while providing various in-wallet features.

However, wallets usually break the user-flow in a dApp for instance, in gaming applications where users might be prompted with a message to manage their seed phrases or signing transactions on every interaction with gameplay. Furthermore, key management and decentralized custodial solutions are also becoming an increased requirement.

• Wallets
• Multi-Party Computation enabled Wallets (Decentralized Custodial Service)
• The private keys and their control are divided between several devices. Each of these devices has under its control a key that, when joined to the rest, enables the use of the funds within said wallet.
• Smart Wallets
• Wallets that allow  batching of transactions and reducing the amount of time the end-user needs to sign a transaction.
• Wallet SDKs with no or negligible key management
• Negligible key management is crucial when onboarding new users especially on gaming/metaverse applications where users can enjoy the experience rather than managing storing seed phrases.

Identity is the layer between front-end and middleware which forms the core basis for authentic experience on front-end. Identity on Blockchain has gone through extensive research and working groups to find the solutions. DiDs, Social graphs and other forms of credentials are foundational building blocks to any social application.

• Identity
• Social Graphs:
• Social Graphs can be perceived as a data structure that facilitates an ever growing network of connections. Social graphs are at the core of designing social media platforms.
• Portable social graphs can allow users to take their identity (including micro-credentials) to different applications such as gaming/metaverse where they can leverage their graph to add more connections and authenticity to a digital identity.
• Verifiable Credentials:
• An immutable record of data, is used to store the Public DiD of the organization who issued the Credentials. When someone wants to verify the authenticity/validity of the Credential, they can check the blockchain to see who issued it without having to contact the issuing party.
• Web3 Identifiers:
• Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. A DID refers to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID.
• Each DID document can express cryptographic material, verification methods, or services, which provide a set of mechanisms enabling a DID controller to prove control of the DID.

Immediate Opportunities on Middleware:

Middleware are the components that lie between backend and front-end. It essentially functions as a translation layer, middleware enables communication and data management for distributed applications. The key function of middleware is to help make application development simpler.

• Application Programming Interface (APIs)
• APIs are mechanisms that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols.
• Data Indexing
• Indexes are used in the background of a database to speed up querying. Indexes power queries by providing a method to quickly lookup the requested data.
• Data Indexing is critical for various on-chain data (transactions, trade volumes, NFTs related stats) as well as off-chain data (media assets, documents etc)
• Integration Layer
• Integration middleware represents software systems that offer runtime services for communications, integration application execution, monitoring and operations.
• Layer that enable multi-chain interoperability (Multi-language wrappers)
• Application Development Framework/SDKs
• Development frameworks created specifically to ease DApp development, like frameworks for frontend/smart contract developers. DApp frameworks are pieces of code written to build software, which helps make building applications for blockchain easier.
• Gasless Solutions
• Gasless solutions are becoming an important category for projects to optimize and increase their on-chain activities. These solutions usually forward the cost of gas/transaction for users to the projects.
• As per the current trend on optimizing Layer 2s for gas cost with zk-rollups. Here, the cost of gas is taken care of by the protocol by batching the transactions and optimizing gas cost on the protocol layer.

Immediate Opportunities on Backend:

• Decentralized Storage (On-Chain and Off-Chain)
• Decentralized storage systems consist of a peer-to-peer network of user-operators who hold a portion of the overall data, creating a resilient file storage sharing system. These can be in a blockchain-based application or any peer-to-peer-based network.

Other Important miscellaneous categories:

• Decentralised Content Delivery Network
• A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
• Decentralized CDN is reliant on distributed nodes, deployed across a network. Third parties can deploy these nodes, and are often incentivized with tokens. These infrastructure could enable Video on Demand globally at fractions of cost.
• Decentralised Video Stream/Transcoding
• Video infrastructure networks that enable developers to access capabilities, such as video transcoding, which are required to create live streaming applications with high reliability and affordable pricing, at scale.
• Decentralised IoT Network
• Decentralized smart IoT, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Blockchain are integrated together. In general, the integration between blockchain and MEC is mutually beneficia. On one hand, blockchain introduces security, privacy, and trust to MEC. Efficient control and incentive of cooperation among edge devices and servers are securely enabled by blockchain. On the other hand, MEC improves the scalability of blockchain in a distributed and efficient manner by delivering computing and cache resources to the blockchain-enabled IoT systems.
• Decentralised Rendering
• Decentralised network upon which stakeholders can tap into underutilized computational power cheaply and efficiently. This is an essential building block for next-generation digital products and services in the metaverse.

BNB is one of the leading L1’s  and we believe that it can serve as a great base layer to develop next-generation applications and solutions. To help protocols building innovative solutions achieve their goals, BNB Chain is strengthening its infra layer.

This is an open call for developers and projects to tap into the opportunities to BUIDL on BNB.

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