Please note: this is a hypothetical scenario. Do not panic
Situation
Binance decides - or is forced - to halt its operations.
Complication
As a consequence it’s announced that BSC is going to be discontinued either**: a) immediately or b) within 30 days
**There’s an implicit assumption that this would automatically happen as a consequence of Binance going down. Is this a fair assumption?
Question
What would happen to Alpaca? What could be our DR plan?
Answer
Looking for thoughts…We know the likelihood of this happening is limited, but after experiencing Luna, FTX, Silvergate and nearly Credit Suisse and Deutsche we know that noone is too big to fail
I was pondering over that scenario too after recent regulatory action and pressure on Binance. I still don’t think that is likely to happen anytime soon.
Regarding your ** assumption: I’m pretty confident BNB chain can and will survive even without Binance. That’s one of the good things about Binance: They managed to build a really good working blockchain and ecosystem. BNB will probably drop a lot but it will still have its on-chain use. Whether the BSC chain would continue to thrive, I don’t know, I have some doubts. I think it would lose importance and market share, it might even decline constantly. But I think it would not come abruptly.
Anyway, it’s always good to have a plan B, a disaster recovery plan. I can only think of going multi-chain would be a solution in such a case. Expanding to a better chain than Fantom, of course.
But I don’t think it should have high priority right now. AF2.0 is much more important.
Let’s start by establishing one assumption, which is that since BSC is Binance’s most decentralized product, if Binance was to shut down due to regulation, BSC would probably be one of the last Binance products to go. In other words, it’s unlikely BSC would get shut down but Binance exchange would remain standing.
Following that, to say the biggest exchange in crypto, by far, will shut down is a bit of an end of the world scenario, and not super useful to plan for. But I think the answer is pretty obvious, which is that we’d migrate to another chain, maybe a zk-L2 or Arbitrum depending on the conditions at this hypothetical time. Also note that we’re also currently on Fantom atm.