BNB Beacon Chain Hard Fork Adds Panic Feature to Halt Blockchain

The Binance-operated BNB Beacon Chain mainnet is set to introduce a new feature in its upcoming hard fork, dubbed “ZhangHeng”, which is scheduled to take place at block height 328,088,888 on July 19. This upgrade will give the blockchain the ability to “halt” the production of new blocks if certain conditions are met.

The hard fork will implement Binance Evolution Proposal BEP-255, which will introduce “on-chain asset reconciliation” to protect the BNB Beacon Chain from potential cross-chain bridge exploits such as the Binance Smart Chain exploit on Oct. 7, 2022.

This drastic action will cause disruption to downstream services such as bridges, deposits, and withdrawals on exchanges, but is necessary to protect the chain and its users. If exploitation exists, related accounts should be blacklisted or corrected. Once the blockchain is resumed, downstream services such as crypto ethereum and spell token crypto can be brought back up as well.

The BEP-255 seeks to provide an example of web 3.0 that will mitigate damage from potential cross-chain bridge exploits, while also providing a way to track user balance changes in each block and reconcile any issues to ensure the security of assets on the BNB Beacon Chain.

Rogue Key Attacks and other upgrades

To address the “Rogue Key Attacks” security issue, a bug fix has been implemented, which will clear up all existing vote addresses when the hardfork height is reached. Validators will need to add vote addresses again.

The upcoming hard fork will also make the BNB Chain capable of handling more complex business rules and logic, as well as offer a layer-2 scaling solution based on Optimism’s OP Stack, called opBNB.

For node operators to comply with the hard fork upgrade, BNB Chain has provided a set of instructions. However, BNB token holders who use Binance.com, other centralized exchanges or cold wallets do not need to take any action.

In order for the hard fork to be successful, two-thirds of validators need to switch their software version to v0.10.16. Full nodes that fail to upgrade will not be able to execute further blocks after the hardfork block height.