Binance Bridge is a cross-chain bridge that lets anyone transfer assets between the BNB Chain and other blockchains.
Binance is the world's largest exchange by trading volume on spot and futures markets. The company was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao (CEO) and has quickly grown to one of the most popular crypto exchanges outside the US. In its effort to decentralize the company, Binance released its own native blockchain, BNB Chain (fork of Ethereum), to provide users with cheap transaction fees to participate in DeFi, NFTs, and more. BNB Chain uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm and uses a multisig scheme to further protect user funds.
The Binance Bridge lets anyone convert their crypto assets into wrapped tokens (or pegged tokens) to be used on the BNB Chain. The wrapped tokens on BNB Chain are backed by real assets locked in the Binance Bridge contract. There are zero fees and conversion takes around a few minutes to execute a cross-chain transfer. Users are only required to pay network transaction fees on the source and destination chains. The bridge locks the native assets and returns to the user BTokens that are pegged on a 1:1 basis to the underlying asset and compatible on the BNB Chain. BTokens can be redeemed at any time back for the native asset.
The main risk of using Binance Bridge is that the user is trusting a centralized entity, Binance, to custody their assets. Since the bridge interface is natively built into its centralized exchange, users are required to go through KYC procedures as well. In the event, Binance or other regulatory authorities flag an account, the user's asset could be frozen and inaccessible.