The goal of BNB Smart Chain is to bring programmability and interoperability to BNB Beacon Chain. In order to embrace the existing popular community and advanced technology, it will bring huge benefits by staying compatible with all the existing smart contracts on Ethereum and Ethereum tooling. And to achieve that, the easiest solution is to develop based on go-ethereum fork, as we respect the great work of Ethereum very much.
BNB Smart Chain starts its development based on go-ethereum fork. So you may see many toolings, binaries and also docs are based on Ethereum ones, such as the name “geth”.
But from that baseline of EVM compatible, BNB Smart Chain introduces a system of 21 validators with Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus that can support short block time and lower fees. The most bonded validator candidates of staking will become validators and produce blocks. The double-sign detection and other slashing logic guarantee security, stability, and chain finality.
Cross-chain transfer and other communication are possible due to native support of interoperability. Relayers and on-chain contracts are developed to support that. BNB Beacon Chain DEX remains a liquid venue of the exchange of assets on both chains. This dual-chain architecture will be ideal for users to take advantage of the fast trading on one side and build their decentralized apps on the other side. **The BNB Smart Chain** will be:
- **A self-sovereign blockchain**: Provides security and safety with elected validators.
- **EVM-compatible**: Supports all the existing Ethereum tooling along with faster finality and cheaper transaction fees.
- **Interoperable**: Comes with efficient native dual chain communication; Optimized for scaling high-performance dApps that require fast and smooth user experience.
- **Distributed with on-chain governance**: Proof of Staked Authority 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.
Although Proof-of-Work (PoW) has been approved as a practical mechanism to implement a decentralized network, it is not friendly to the environment and also requires a large size of participants to maintain the security.
Proof-of-Authority(PoA) provides some defense to 51% attack, with improved efficiency and tolerance to certain levels of Byzantine players (malicious or hacked).
Meanwhile, the PoA protocol is most criticized for being not as decentralized as PoW, as the validators, i.e. the nodes that take turns to produce blocks, have all the authorities and are prone to corruption and security attacks.
Other blockchains, such as EOS and Cosmos both, introduce different types of Deputy Proof of Stake (DPoS) to allow the token holders to vote and elect the validator set. It increases the decentralization and favors community governance.
5. Parlia consensus engine will interact with a set of [system contracts](https://docs.bnbchain.org/docs/learn/system-contract) to achieve liveness slash, revenue distributing and validator set renewing func.
1. [Stateless Precompiled contracts](https://github.com/bnb-chain/bsc/blob/master/core/vm/contracts_lightclient.go) to do tendermint header verification and Merkle Proof verification.
2. [Stateful solidity contracts](https://github.com/bnb-chain/bsc-genesis-contract/blob/master/contracts/TendermintLightClient.sol) to store validator set and trusted appHash.
For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the [Installation Instructions](https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/getting-started/installing-geth).
| **`geth`** | Main BNB Smart Chain client binary. It is the entry point into the BSC network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default), archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It has the same and more RPC and other interface as go-ethereum and can be used by other processes as a gateway into the BSC network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. `geth --help` and the [CLI page](https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/interface/command-line-options) for command line options. |
| `clef` | Stand-alone signing tool, which can be used as a backend signer for `geth`. |
| `devp2p` | Utilities to interact with nodes on the networking layer, without running a full blockchain. |
| `abigen` | Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain [Ethereum contract ABIs](https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/develop/abi-spec.html) with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However, it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our [Native DApps](https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/dapp/native-bindings) page for details. |
| `bootnode` | Stripped down version of our Ethereum client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks. |
| `evm` | Developer utility version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. `evm --code 60ff60ff --debug run`). |
| `rlpdump` | Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP ([Recursive Length Prefix](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/data-structures-and-encoding/rlp)) dumps (data encoding used by the Ethereum protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user-friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. `rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263`). |
Note: if you can not download the chaindata snapshot and want to sync from genesis, you have to generate the genesis block first, you have already get the genesis.json in Step 2.
So just run: `geth --datadir <datadir> init ./genesis.json`
More details about [running a node](https://docs.bnbchain.org/docs/validator/fullnode) and [becoming a validator](https://docs.bnbchain.org/docs/validator/create-val)
- [BSC-Deploy](https://github.com/bnb-chain/node-deploy/): deploy tool for setting up both BNB Beacon Chain, BNB Smart Chain and the cross chain infrastructure between them.
Bootnodes are super-lightweight nodes that are not behind a NAT and are running just discovery protocol. When you start up a node it should log your enode, which is a public identifier that others can use to connect to your node.
First the bootnode requires a key, which can be created with the following command, which will save a key to boot.key:
```
bootnode -genkey boot.key
```
This key can then be used to generate a bootnode as follows:
