Last week, Binance boss Changpeng Zhao (CZ) declared that after the exchange received a license in Kazakhstan, his team had persuaded Berik Sholpankulov, the First Deputy of the Governor of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, to test integrating the Digital Tenge with the BNB blockchain.
While he stopped short of confirming integration, the tweets started a frenzy of rumors and digital currency media articles speculating that BNB Chain would be the home of Kazakh CBDC.
Quick story about the #Binance team relentlessly pushing crypto adoption globally.
2 weeks ago Binance got a license in Kazakhstan. But we didn't stop there. (1/4)
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) October 26, 2022
To this, I ask—are you kidding me? Surely the top people at Kazakhstan’s national bank and the head of its payment and technology center are more informed than that?
BNB Blockchain came to a grinding halt last month
While Zhao and others like him love to speak about ‘decentralization’ and how it will liberate the world from the control of governments and large corporations, an attack on BNB Chain last month demonstrated the opposite.
After a hacker stole hundreds of millions from users, Binance put out a request that validators temporarily switch off and bring the network to a halt. They did so immediately, and the BNB Blockchain stopped working for approximately eight hours.
While no blockchain is immune from malicious attacks, how validators, miners, and others handle it matters. For example, an empty block miner recently attacked the BSV blockchain, but at no point did miners try to “switch the network off and on again” as a solution. Instead, BSV miners are committed to using technical solutions and the law to mitigate attacks.
This begs the question: if the head of a large digital currency exchange can request validators to switch off and stop the network from functioning, how is this anything more than a spreadsheet Binance controls? One would think that a national CBDC would have to be built on a more secure enterprise ready blockchain than BNB. Building the digital Tenge on it would be the equivalent of giving Zhao and his buddies control over a national currency.
In reality, CBDCs will have to be built on infinitely scalable blockchains that facilitate micro and nano payments affordably. BNB is not the answer. Perhaps the Kazakh government officials involved should read nChain’s CBDC playbook to learn more about what they’re getting into.
BSV is the only solution to all of the problems in ‘crypto’
At this stage of the game, no blockchain is as yet perfect. Dr. Craig Wright himself has said that “scaling Bitcoin is hard,” and it will take lots of work before it reaches the billions of transactions per second required to run IPv6 and CBDCs on it.
Yet, in the long term, Satoshi’s original Bitcoin protocol is still the most technically capable, and all attempts to improve upon it have fallen short. Ethereum isn’t worth mentioning, BNB has revealed itself to be both vulnerable to attacks and controlled by Binance, and chains like Cardano have achieved precisely nothing since their inception.
Sooner or later, all the speculation, promises, and potential will have to manifest in something concrete and useful. When that day comes, only one blockchain can handle the 24/7 throughput CBDCs will require: Bitcoin SV.
Bitcoin SV is the alpha and omega—the original and the future
Right now, far from having reached its true scaling potential, BSV already processes millions of transactions daily at sub-cent fees. A growing list of applications powering everything from network security tools like Certihash to games like CryptoFights are using BSV to power their applications.
The Kazakh government, and everyone else involved in making decisions about what public blockchains to build their CBDCs on, should engage in an honest study to see what each blockchain is capable of today. Rather than trusting hucksters like Zhao and Binance, who have been chased out of every jurisdiction they’ve set up shop in, they should assess the technology dispassionately and objectively and discover for themselves which blockchain can deliver the throughput they need at the fees required.
When they do, there will only be one answer: Bitcoin SV, the original protocol released in 2009, which after more than a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, and countless attempts to create better blockchains, has never come close to being beaten.
To learn more about central bank digital currencies and some of the design decisions that need to be considered when creating and launching it, read nChain’s CBDC playbook.
Follow CoinGeek’s Crypto Crime Cartel series, which delves into the stream of groups—a from BitMEX to Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ShapeShift, Coinbase, Ripple,
Ethereum, FTX and Tether—who have co-opted the digital asset revolution and turned the industry into a minefield for naïve (and even experienced) players in the market.
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