The last few weeks gas fees on the Ethereum network sky-high. This has motivated many people to explore other blockchain options. And even though gas fees have subsided lately, considerable growth has been observed in alternative chains.
The BINANCE Smart Chain has stepped into the limelight, becoming the main beneficiary of this migration out of the Ethereum chain. According to DappRadar’s report for the month of February, the BSC has surpassed USD 700 Billions in transactions for the month. And a big reason for the quick growth of this blockchain can be attributed to the similarities between BSC and the Ethereum Virtual Machine in terms of coding and structure.
I was extremely surprised by how easy it was to get into the BSC universe using the same METAMASK wallet software already running in my BRAVE browser for the Ethereum Chain. The first step is to get the Binance Chain Wallet extension from the Chrome store.
Once you have installed that extension you must go to your Metamask wallet to add the new Smart Chain network. You just go to the Network section in the Settings tab and select ADD NETWORK. At this point you can add the Binance Smart Chain to your Metamask wallet network list.
These are the parameters you will need:
For the Testnet:
RPC URLs ChainID: 97 (if 97 doesn’t work, try 0x61)
Symbol: BNB
Block Explorer: https://testnet.bscscan.com
For the Mainnet:
RPC URLs ChainID: 56 (if 56 doesn’t work, try 0x38)
Symbol: BNB
Block Explorer: https://bscscan.com
You can read an excellent step by step explanation from the buys at Binance.com HERE.
Now that you have a BSC chain account you will need some BNB to pay for the transaction fees. It is quite easy to do that from the Binance website. Once you have bought BNB, or if you want to send any other coin to your BSC wallet, you just go to your Binance account wallet and withdraw the coins to your address selecting the Binance Smart Chain (BEP20) network.
The procedure was quite straight forward for me. And once I had some BEP20 coins in my wallet I was able to access many Dex and Dapps with much lower transaction costs.
It may take me a while to get used to the new token names in this BSC universe, but it all feels so familiar, as many of the tools available are quite similar to those I’m using in the Eth Chain. I’m sure anyone moving from Eth to BSC will have the same experience.
