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I understand the vision for Binance is to create a decentralized crypto exchange. Wouldn't it be more flexible to build their own block-chain rather than rely on an existing one (ETH)?

From my understanding tokens based on ETH is programmable because of ETH's VM. So programmers need to code in ETH's higher level language such as Solidity. It is very apparent that Solidity and its peers are not designed as a general-purpose programming language and not suitable for building and optimizing a distributed exchange.

Can someone explain to me why Binance does not build their own block-chain code from scratch?

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  • How is it exactly "very apparent that Solidity and its peers are not designed as a general-purpose programming language"?
    – Alex Sk
    Feb 21 '18 at 19:40
  • Because of the goal of Solidity is to "for writing smart contracts". It's not optimized for performance (e.g., no multi-thread support). I think "writing smart contracts" and "writing exchange" are two different goals that diverge too far.
    – Helin Wang
    Feb 21 '18 at 19:46
  • Hi there. The EVM itself isn't capable of multi-threading or parallelisation - it's not a limitation imposed by Solidity. Also note that it's possible to write contracts directly in assembly. If your question is more about why they're using stuff built on top of the EVM, you'll need to ask them :-)
    – Richard Horrocks
    Feb 21 '18 at 20:02
  • Thanks @RichardHorrocks ! Yes you are right, it's better to ask them :)
    – Helin Wang
    Feb 21 '18 at 20:04
  • This April BNB has totally abandoned the Ethereum blockchain in favor of the new Binance blockchain. If you look at the BNB stats you will probably think that this coin is going to elevate radically. It's hard to say if Ethereum will manage to keep its position. The time will show.
    – Breec
    May 7 '19 at 15:18
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Building you own blockchain is not difficult, but making it secure is really hard. I am not only talking about writing secure code, but about the entire infrastructure: The security of distributed systems (such as blockchains) depends on the number of validators/miners/nodes check a state update before it is considered common truth.

If everyone just built their own system just because the software would be a little bit better optimized, we would have won nothing, because every developer would have to find (and somehow pay) enough distributed nodes to control their system. It would also be way harder for the general population to trusts them, because they are not using a known secure system like Ethereum but building their own thing.

And about Solidity being not very good for high-performance software: I agree, Solidity is way to basic ans misses a lot of functions to be used in larger software projects. But the EVM is not exclusive to Solidity, there will be other languages that compile to Ethereums assembler code that will eventually have more advanced features like threading. (Assuming the scaling problem gets solved and Ethereum manages to handle Millions or even Billions of transactions per second.

And the last argument: Compatibility. Ethereum is the largest platform for tokens, so it makes sense to build a token exchange on it. There will be ways to map other tokens to the Ethereum chain in the future (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and many others are in the making) but this also requires more tps than currently possible.

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  • Thanks! I speculate that Binance will roll out their own BNB block-chain later, one big reason is the goal of Ethereum platform is not necessarily aligned with the goal of Binance. What you said about EVM is definitely true, but if that comes in the far future and the Binance team need it in the near future, they have to do their own implementation.
    – Helin Wang
    Feb 21 '18 at 21:50
  • In this sense, I think the importance of ETH will decrease as the need for ICO decreases due to governments' regulation and big tokens transitioning to their own chain. However my understanding of the ETH platform is very limited, please enlighten me.
    – Helin Wang
    Feb 21 '18 at 21:51

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