BNB Smart Chain

1. A self-sovereign blockchain: Provides security and safety with elected validators.
2. EVM-compatible: Supports all the existing Ethereum tooling along with faster finality and cheaper transaction fees.
3. Fast Finality: Finalizes the chain within two blocks in most cases.
4. Interoperable: Comes with efficient native dual chain communication; Optimized for scaling high-performance dApps that require a fast and smooth user experience.
5. Distributed with on-chain governance: Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) brings in decentralization and community participants. As the native token, BNB will serve as both the gas of smart contract execution and tokens for staking.

BSC combines DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) and PoA (Proof-of-Authority) for consensus, so that:

1. Blocks are produced by a limited set of validators
2. Validators take turns to produce blocks in a PoA manner, similar to Ethereum's Clique consensus design
3. Validator set are elected in and out based on a staking based governance

The consensus protocol of BSC fulfills the following goals:

1. Short Blocking time, 3 seconds on mainnet.
2. It requires quite short time to confirm the finality of transactions, around 6s for mainnet after the coming Plato upgrade.
3. There is no inflation of native token: BNB, the block reward is collected from transaction fees, and it will be paid in BNB.
4. It is 100% compatible with Ethereum system.
5. It allows modern proof-of-stake blockchain network governance.

Proof of Staked Authority brings in decentralization and community involvement. Its core logic can be summarized as the below. You may see similar ideas from other networks, especially Cosmos and EOS.

1. Token holders, including the validators, can put their tokens "bonded" into the stake. Token holders can delegate their tokens onto any validator or validator candidate, to expect it can become an actual validator, and later they can choose a different validator or candidate to re-delegate their tokens.
2. All validator candidates will be ranked by the number of bonded tokens on them, and the top ones will become the real validators.
3. Validators can share (part of) their blocking reward with their delegators.
4. Validators can suffer from "Slashing", a punishment for their bad behaviors, such as double sign and/or instability.
5. There is an "unbonding period" for validators and delegators so that the system makes sure the tokens remain bonded when bad behaviors are caught, the responsible will get slashed during this period.