BNB Chain intends to disable its atomic swap feature in April and all Bridge providers will be expected to begin informing users by February.
We are in the first few weeks of 2024 and the scene is seemingly being set for the rest of the year. The industry is still on a high note from the recently- announced Bitcoin spot ETF approval but even more news is rolling in. The latest comes from BNB Chain, which recently announced the six-month roadmap for its BNB Beacon Chain Fusion. The roadmap was officially released on January 11, 2024.
How BNB Will Change
As per the official release, there will be a shift in the BNB Chain’s network architecture moving forward. This will be “carefully managed through a series of clear monthly targets”.
January appears to be one of the busier months in the calendar and the first course of action is notifying validators and staking pools about the staking feature being disabled. This has already taken place.
The next step will be the binding of all BEP2 and BEP8 assets to BNB Smart Chain (BSC), as well as informing asset holders of this change. The announcement notes that this will allow users to conduct cross-chain withdrawals of their assets to BSC. January will also see the integration of various crypto wallets to support cross-chain withdrawals for BEP2/BEP8 assets. Finally, various centralized exchanges like Binance and wallets like Trust Wallet will be advised to stop asset transfers to the Beacon Chain.
BNB Chain also intends to disable its atomic swap feature in April and all Bridge providers will be expected to begin informing users by February. The first course of action for April will be to complete the migration of all validators to the Binance Smart Chain. In that same month, all validators are expected to have transferred their voting power and new delegators should have been chosen.
By May, all users and delegators would have been expected to validate their auto-refunded balances. The management of the BNB Chain also plans to generate and publicly share a balance dump with the wider community. This, they say, is to promote transparency and trust.
The final month in this six-month roadmap will involve the release of a CLI (Command Line Interface) token migration application. According to the official statement, it will, “assist users in retrieving funds still on the Beacon Chain, marking an important phase in the roadmap.”
All these efforts are working towards a more efficient BNB Chain and it will be interesting to see them play out. From all indications, the management of the chain plans to give ample time for all stakeholders to not only be informed of the changes coming but also to take the appropriate actions to secure their assets in time.
