Is zkBNB a blockchain or just a layer 2 application?

Question

I found zkBNB to be a scaling solution for Binance Smart Chain (BSC), but didn't find in its docs if it is a blockchain. It is?

Answer 1

zkBNB is a layer 2 blockchain scaling framework for Binance Smart Chain. ZkBNB is built on ZK Rollup architecture. Following are the key modules in the framework as per their GitHub repo. As it produces blocks, translates them to transactions and generates cryptographic proofs and send them to layer 1 BSC chain, we can consider them as a layer 2 blockchain.

• Committer. Committer executes transactions and produce consecutive blocks.
• Monitor. Monitor tracks events on BSC, and translates them into transactions on ZkBNB.
• Witness. Witness re-executes the transactions within the block and generates witness materials.
• Prover. Prover generates cryptographic proof based on the witness materials.
• Sender. The sender rollups the compressed l2 blocks to L1, and submit proof to verify it.
• Api server. The api server is the access endpoints for most users, it provides rich data, including digital assets, blocks, transactions, gas fees.
• Recovery. A tool to recover the sparse merkle tree in kv-rocks based on the state world in postgresql.