Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

BNB Chain is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). BNB Chain was founded by Changpeng Zhao and launched in 2020.

BNB holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Blockchains (L1)

BNB Chain

# BNB Chain Number of validators Methodology

## 1. Overview

The BSC number of validators metric measures the daily count of unique active validators participating in the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. This metric provides insight into the decentralization and network security of BSC by tracking how many distinct validator nodes are actively participating in block production and validation at any given time. The calculation aggregates unique validator addresses from network state data and counts the total number of active validators per day.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on the following raw data sources:
- **BSC validator set state data**: Network state snapshots containing the active validator set at different points in time, stored as JSON arrays of validator addresses
- **BSC consensus data**: Information about which validators are actively participating in the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism
- **Validator registry data**: Records of validator addresses that have registered to participate in network consensus

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Validator data processing
- **Purpose**: Extract and normalize individual validator addresses from JSON arrays in the raw validator set data
- **Logic**: The system takes BSC network state data containing JSON arrays of validator addresses for each timestamp. Individual validator addresses are extracted from these JSON arrays using array unnesting operations. Each validator address is normalized to lowercase format and validated as a proper string to ensure data consistency. Invalid or malformed addresses are filtered out during this process.
- **Key fields**: The `validators` field contains JSON arrays of validator addresses, `timestamp` indicates when the validator set was active, and `validator_item` represents individual extracted validator addresses

### Component B: Daily aggregation
- **Purpose**: Group validator addresses by day and create arrays of unique validators for each timestamp
- **Logic**: Validator addresses are grouped by daily timestamps to create daily snapshots of the validator set. Duplicate validator addresses within each day are removed to ensure each validator is counted only once per day, regardless of how many times they appear in the raw data. All unique validator addresses for each day are aggregated into arrays using distinct aggregation functions.
- **Key fields**: The `timestamp` field defines daily boundaries, `timestamp_grain` is set to "day", and `validator_array` contains the deduplicated list of unique validators for each day

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The processed validator arrays from daily aggregation are passed to the final metric calculation
- **Currency conversion**: Not applicable for this metric as it counts validators rather than measuring monetary values
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are maintained with forward-fill logic applied to handle any missing data points in the time series
- **Final calculation**: The `array_length` function is applied to each daily validator array to count the total number of unique validators. The result represents the number of distinct validator addresses that were active on BSC for each day. Additional metadata is applied including market sector classification as "blockchains_l1", business segment as "blockchain", and product/chain identification as "bsc". Chain availability filters ensure data meets quality standards before final output.

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Number of active validators securing the network.

BNB ChainBNB

Number of validators

Number of validators

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown