After 14 years and a few bull markets, people start getting familiar with blockchains, Distributed (or decentralized) Ledger Technology, cryptocurrency, DeFi, ..., and derived economy models around these concepts and practices. Many hold and exchange tokens and participate in related activities that may change or have changed the way how values are exchanged and governed.
"Web3", the term coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, becomes a popular buzzword again in 2021. Among all the definitions of "Web3", we, the BNB Foundation and BNB Chain Core Dev, embrace the below narrative from Eshita the most:
Web3 is adding "Own" to Web2's "Read-Write".
We believe what blockchains bring is the freedom of how assets and valuable things are owned, exchanged, and transferred among people.
The crypto industry has already picked up financial assets: the tokens, stablecoins, and DeFi cover many economic scenarios. On the other hand, NFTs implement arts and collectibles. But there are plenty of items that are not innovated well enough, such as credit, real-world asset (RWA) tokenizations, and the one we'd like to focus on in this paper:
The value of a data asset is not self-evident when it is just held by one person. They become much more valuable when they are shared and used. It is valuable to possess and exchange the power to write, read, grant rights for sharing the data, and even execute one data to generate another. These abilities have derived value with financial traits: they are tradable and the trades can generate even more value and benefit the two parties, instead of one.
We foresee the need to create a new Web3 infrastructure for data, as two major features are still missing: a performant, convenient, and friendly decentralized storage infra, and the data-focused smart contract synergy. Thus we decide to create a new BNB side blockchain and relevant infrastructure, with which the users and developers can:
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"login" with anonymous cryptographic-based keys (IDs);
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create, read, share, and even execute data with the user experience and cost close to the state-of-art cloud storage service today;
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fully own their data assets and control who can use them and how;
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easily put their data assets into a wide, smart-contract-based economic context to gain financial value with them.
In short, with this new infrastructure, users can "login", create, own, share, execute, and trade their data assets at another level of freedom, and what is more, enjoy another level of transparency on how their data is owned and used.
Transparency of the data lifecycle is key in the Web3 era. It helps to show how the data is generated and how it is used so that users can and want to control it. More importantly, it encourages the community to introduce new business models, which should be more open and fair.
This whitepaper is about the design and implementation of such a series of systems, named "BNB Greenfield", and calls for more "buidlers" to build their own data infrastructure and business with it.
The paper contains 3 Parts. Part 1 talks about the design, including the main technical logic and economic considerations; Part 2 provides showcases that can be imagined in laboratories to inspire how new applications may use the new infrastructure; Part 3 is a more detailed technical specification for the design in Part 1, although they are still simplified to a certain degree. We suggest you read through Part 1 and Part 2 sequentially, but only refer to Part 3 when you need to dig into the details for particular components.