Skip to main content

How to Access BNB Beacon Chain

Get Started pages already show how to access BNB Beacon Chain and DEX via Wallet and Explorers. Here we would like to dive into some technology details for access in a programming way.

There are 3 ways to read and write data from BNB Beacon Chain :

Web API

The Accelerated Node infrastructure provides easy access via http REST APIs and WebSocket push APIs. There are multiple endpoints from different validator's infrastructure. Please check the Web API Reference

Node RPC

There are public data seed nodes that joins the BNB Beacon Chain network. They usually provide RPC calls. Please check the Node RPC Reference.

You can also run a full node by yourself, so that you will have a local server to send RPC requests and read Chain information off.

Command Line Interface

Essentially command line interfaces are just tools that wrap the incoming command line arguments and call RPCs. Please check the Command Line Reference.

Write APIs

You can only write to BNB Beacon Chain via Transactions. Both Web API and Node RPC provide a broadcastTx API to submit a signed and encoded transaction onto the BNB Beacon Chain . The detailed process is outlined below:

Message Composition

The transaction message and related information will be packed into payload, which is the so called Standard Transaction.

The transaction body, memo, signature, etc. all fill in the Standard Transaction, encode and then broadcast out together onto BNB Beacon Chain .

Transaction Encoding

Encoding defines the way how transactions are serialized and transferred between clients and nodes, and different nodes themselves. here is a detailed specification on the transaction types and encoding logic.

Signature

Signature is the evidence to prove the sender owns the transaction. It will be created from the actions outlined below:

  1. Compose a data structure. please note msgs, memo, source, data are the same as in the above payload.

    • chain_id: a string, unique ID for the Chain, it stays the same for most time, but may vary as BNB Beacon Chain evolves;
    • account_number: a string for a 64-bit integer, an identifier number associated with the signing address
    • sequence: a string for a a 64-bit integer, please check the below
    • memo: a string, a short sentence of remark for the transaction
    • msgs: a byte array, json encoded transaction messages, please check the encoding section.
    • source: a string for a 64 bits integer, which is an identifier for transaction incoming tools
    • data: byte array, reserved for future use
  1. Encode the above data structure in json, with ordered key, Specifically:

    • Maps have their keys sorted lexicographically
    • Structs keys are marshalled in the order defined in the struct
  1. Sign SHA256 of the encoded byte array, to create an ECDSA signature on curve Secp256k1 and serialize the R and S result into a 64-byte array. (both R and S are encoded into 32-byte big endian integers, and then R is put into the first 32 bytes and S are put into the last 32 bytes of the byte array. In order to break S 's malleability, S set to curve.Order() - S if S > curnve.Order()/2.)

The signature will be encoded together with transaction message and sent as payload to BNB Beacon Chain node via RPC or http REST API, as described in the above section.

Account and Sequence Number

After Account is created, besides the balances, Account also contains:

  • Account Number: an internal identifier for the account
  • Sequence Number: an ever-changing integer.

The Sequence Number is the way how BNB Beacon Chain prevents Replay Attack (the idea is borrowed from Cosmos network, but varies a bit in handling). Every transaction should have a new Sequence Number increased by 1 from the current latest sequence number of the Account, and after this transaction is recorded on the block chain, the Sequence Number will be set to the same number as the one of latest transaction.

This logic forces the client to be aware of the current Sequence Number, either by reading from the blockchain via API, or keep the counting locally by themselves. The recommended way is to keep counting locally and re-synchronize from the blockchain periodically.

Examples

SDK in different languages are provided to simplify use of APIs to access BNB Beacon Chain .