Trading data is now available for Binance Smart Chain

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is an EVM compatible blockchain launched by Binance. Binance Smart Chain is a popular blockchain for decentralised finance (DeFi) among everyday investors due to easy withdraws from Binance and cheap transaction costs.

Trading Strategy protocol provides on-chain market data feeds from decentralised exchanges, mainly serving algorithmic and systematic trading communities. We have one of the largest market datasets in the world on token trading pairs and offer the price and volume data in the familiar OHLCV data format for easy use by strategy developers and analysts.  Trading Strategy also provides strategy developers with a set of tools for trading algorithm development and backtesting using the widely used Python programming language.

Trading Strategy has now added support to Binance Smart Chain, increasing our tracked trading pair coverage from 50k to 700k trading pairs.

You can explore our Binance Smart Chain data here.

What is inside Binance Smart Chain?

Binance Smart Chain is one of the most popular EVM chains. It recently exceeded 2M active addresses (vs. 800k on Ethereum mainnet).

As Trading Strategy is a protocol for active trading, and our data feeds focus on DEX and trading pairs on them, here we break down some statistics from Binance Smart Chain that you might find interesting.

Exchanges on BSC

Currently, we provide data feeds for Uniswap v2 compatible automated market-making exchanges - the most popular decentralised exchange (DEX) type by a far marking.

BSC has over 1,000 deployed exchange smart contracts. Currently, over 200 of them are active (having traded during the past 30 days).

PancakeSwap, with its version 1 and version 2, dominates Binance Smart Chain, or decentralised exchanges overall, in trading activity.

Trading pairs

Binance Smart Chain trading pairs across all DEXs have seen tens of millions of trades. Here is the breakdown of the most popular trading pairs by the number of trades.

    #1 WBNB - BUSD: 31,368,314 swaps
    #2 WBNB - USDT: 19,620,368 swaps
    #3 WBNB - BUSD: 11,916,113 swaps
    #4 PVU - WBNB: 9,205,931 swaps
    #5 Cake - WBNB: 7,708,404 swaps
    #6 Cake - WBNB: 4,287,350 swaps
    #7 WBNB - USDT: 4,204,883 swaps
    #8 SAFEMOON - WBNB: 4,150,784 swaps
    #9 BUSD - USDT: 3,777,662 swaps
    #10 SAFEMOON - WBNB: 3,720,216 swaps
    #11 ETH - WBNB: 3,163,600 swaps
    #12 BabyDoge - WBNB: 2,971,044 swaps
    #13 Cake - BUSD: 2,134,650 swaps
    #14 WBNB - BUSD: 1,989,525 swaps
    #15 SKILL - WBNB: 1,964,940 swaps
    #16 WBNB - BUSD: 1,929,315 swaps
    #17 BUSD - USDT: 1,794,033 swaps
    #18 BTCB - WBNB: 1,738,652 swaps
    #19 BUNNY - WBNB: 1,631,029 swaps
    #20 FEG - WBNB: 1,584,804 swaps

the native fee currency of Binance Smart Chain, and its US Dollar pair BUSD dominate the trades.

From 700k trading pairs, most of them are ghost pairs: basically trials, etc. with not any real activity.  Still, after filtering, we have 50k trading pairs with at least some historical OHLCV data generated.

Quote tokens

Another way to break down the data is to look at the quote token in the trading pairs - what are the most popular tokens to be traded against. In traditional finance, you would always trade against a fiat currency (USD, EUR, GBP), but on decentralised finance, this is not often the case.

    #1 WBNB: 639,409 pairs
    #2 BUSD: 23,214 pairs
    #3 USDT: 14,084 pairs
    #4 Cake: 3,448 pairs
    #5 ETH: 1,528 pairs
    #6 BTCB: 1,253 pairs
    #7 USDC: 1,160 pairs
    #8 SAFEMOON: 708 pairs
    #9 DAI: 702 pairs
    #10 ADA: 580 pairs
    #11 BURGER: 462 pairs
    #12 DOGE: 457 pairs
    #13 fBNB: 412 pairs
    #14 DOT: 405 pairs
    #15 BAKE: 395 pairs
    #16 XBN: 338 pairs
    #17 BANANA: 277 pairs
    #18 XRP: 272 pairs
    #19 FEG: 241 pairs
    #20 BabyDoge: 233 pairs

BNB, in the form of Wrapped BNB (WBNB), is the most popular trading by the margin of 30x. After that, we get 37,000 US dollar pairs. ETH (as custodied by Binance) and Cake (the token of PancakeSwap) make their appearances in thousands of pairs as well.

Market data challenges with Binance Smart Chain nodes

Binance Smart Chain uses a very old GoEthereum architecture that was never designed for high transaction throughput. Because Binance Smart Chain artificially tries to keep transaction costs low, this is reflected as blockchain issues and interruptions. A lot of trading bots are spamming the network with useless transactions due to their near-free cost, causing the blocks to be unnecessary full.

The problem of extra-large blocks and block spam manifests as Binance Smart Chain nodes not having good sync on the latest data. This issue with the operational network quality is also the reason why any of the DeFi blue-chip projects, like Aave and Curve, do not consider Binance Smart Chain long-term viable.

As Trading Strategy provides market data feeds for thousands of trading pairs and may do up to billions of API requests to nodes daily, we need to run our own nodes for the blockchains that the protocol supports. We use cutting edge hardware. Despite this, we have problems with having our Binance Smart Chain nodes kept in sync. When the sync is lost, catching up with unsynced blocks will take some days - too long for real-time market data.

We have added a disclaimer on the Binance Smart Chain market data pages to warn users that the data might not be stale due to network quality issues and when we believe our node is not getting good sync.

Working around BSC sync issues

Binance Smart Chain Node may fall out of sync due to network issues, mandatory upgrades, or simply by degenerated performance over time: it is likely a full BSC node will stop working without taking it offline and pruning in a few weeks of time. Here is our blog post on how to optimise your server for hosting a Binance Smart Chain node.

Learn more

Follow us on Twitter and follow us on Telegram. For any questions, come to Trading Strategy Discord chat and our team members will answer.

Trading Strategy is an algorithmic trading protocol for decentralised markets, enabling automated trading on decentralised exchanges (DEXs). Learn more about algorithmic trading here.

Join our community of traders and developers on Discord.

TradingStrategy.ai operated by Trading Strategy Operations Ltd., Victoria, Mahe, Seychelles.