2025 was a defining year for BNB Chain.

Throughout the year, the network consistently operated at large scale, supporting sustained growth across trading activity, stablecoins, and real-world assets without downtime. These outcomes were the result of deliberate technical priorities set early in the year: reliability, speed, cost efficiency, and fairness.

The 2026 tech roadmap builds directly on this foundation. It reflects the lessons learned from operating the network under real production load and outlines how BNB Chain will continue scaling performance, execution quality, and infrastructure resilience as usage grows further.

2025 Technical Outcomes That Shape the Road Ahead

During 2025, BNB Chain focused on four core technical goals:

• Reliable: Zero downtime throughout the year, even while processing up to 5 trillion gas per day
• Faster: Sub-second block times and finality
• Cheaper: Gas prices reduced from 1 gwei to 0.05 gwei, with progress toward gasless transactions
• Fairer: Malicious MEV reduced by 95% through coordinated ecosystem efforts

These goals translated into tangible network outcomes, including a 40.5% increase in TVL, an all-time high of 31 million daily transactions with 150% year-over-year growth, leading growth in trading volume with over 50% contribution, a doubling of stablecoin market capitalization to $14billion, at its peak, with the highest daily active users across blockchains, and RWA market capitalization exceeding $1.8 billion (at time of writing) supported by institutional issuers such as USYC, BlackRock’s BUIDL, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, and VanEck’s VBILL.

These metrics are not isolated successes, they reflect how the network behaved under sustained, real-world usage and they directly inform the priorities for 2026.

Performance Upgrades at the Protocol Level

BNB Chain’s performance improvements in 2025 were driven by four major hardforks: Pascal, Lorentz, Maxwell, and the ongoing Fermi upgrade.

Through these upgrades:

• Block time was reduced from 3 seconds to 0.45 seconds
• Finality was reduced from 7.5 seconds to 1.125 seconds
• Network bandwidth more than doubled to 133 million gas per second

Since these changes, the network has consistently handled up to 5 trillion gas used per day, equivalent to approximately 238 million native transfers.

These improvements established the baseline for high-throughput execution and set the stage for further performance gains in 2026.

Cost Efficiency Under Real Load

Lower fees were not achieved by reducing network usage, but by improving execution efficiency.

Gas Price dropped roughly 20 times, from 1Gwei to 0.05Gwei, making it affordable to interact with the network even during periods of intense activity. Importantly, this reduction was achieved without undermining validator incentives.

Further software-based gas optimizations remain a core focus for 2026, allowing continued fee reductions while preserving validator APY.

Reliability During Peak Trading Activity

In 2025, trading-driven activity dominated network usage. Swaps accounted for more than half of all transactions, particularly during periods of meme-driven trading and the $BNB all-time high.

On October 5th, 2025, BNB Chain reached an all-time high of 31 million daily transactions. The network successfully supported multiple transaction peaks throughout the year without downtime or outages.

This level of reliability under cost-intensive workloads is now treated as a baseline expectation rather than a milestone.

A Faster, Smarter Client Stack

To further improve performance and reliability, BNB Chain released new Rust-based clients built on Reth.

Key outcomes include:

• Release of Reth-based full node and archive node clients
• Full node block synchronization improved by approximately 30%
• TrieDB optimizations delivered an additional ~40% performance improvement
• Archive node stability issues during traffic peaks were resolved

The first alpha version of a Reth-based validator node has also been released. A production-ready validator client with advanced performance features is planned for release in 2026.

These improvements strengthen node performance across the network and reduce operational friction for infrastructure operators.

Smarter Execution for Complex Transactions

In the first half of 2025, BNB Chain introduced Super Instructions, which combine multiple common EVM operations into a single optimized instruction. This change delivered approximately a 10% improvement in EVM execution performance.

Beyond this, the core team conducted extensive research into:

• Ahead-of-Time and Just-in-Time compilation
• Interpreter optimizations
• Parallel execution strategies

These efforts support the goal of exceeding 20,000 transactions per second in 2026.

Addressing State Growth with Scalable DB

State growth presents a long-term challenge for high-throughput chains.

To address this, BNB Chain implemented Scalable DB, a re-architecture of the storage layer designed to handle exponential state growth while preserving performance.

Scalable DB introduces:

• Multi-layered sharding across the storage system
• Distributed data handling to mitigate state bloat
• Strict consistency and integrity guarantees

This system is a strategic investment in the network’s long-term sustainability and ensures that throughput gains are not eroded by growing state size.

2026 BSC Optimizations

BSC as A Highly Optimized EVM Trading Chain

BNB Chain will continue operating a dual-client strategy:

• Geth-based client - Maintained as the stability anchor for validator compatibility and operational reliability
• Reth-based client - Developed as the high-performance engine for full nodes, archive nodes, and future validator participation

The execution roadmap targets:

• 20,000 TPS with sub-second finality
• Further reductions in gas fees through software optimizations
• Advanced consensus and network latency improvements to push finality deeper into sub-second territory

Performance-Optimized EVM Execution Engine

To support shorter block times, execution performance must scale accordingly.

Planned improvements include:

• A new execution engine focused on best-in-class single-core performance using register-based interpretation and AOT/JIT techniques
• Conflict-less parallel execution during block chasing using EIP-7928 (BAL), which has already delivered a 20% performance improvement
• Static analysis to pre-determine transaction dependencies during block generation, enabling efficient parallel execution

Parallel-Friendly Storage

Parallel execution requires a storage layer designed for concurrent access.

Planned work includes:

• Redesigning storage systems for parallel-friendly access
• Upgrading prefetching mechanisms to cooperate with PEVM
• Exploring new storage solutions to maximize throughput

Middleware for optimized developer experience on BNB Chain

BNB Chain will continue developing middleware that reduces complexity for advanced applications:

• Privacy Framework: Configurable, compliance-friendly privacy for high-frequency trading and everyday transfers without sacrificing composability
• AI Agent Framework: A standardized payment abstraction layer for AI agents, along with an agent registry supporting identity, reputation scoring, and verifiable capabilities

The Next-Generation Trading Chain (2026–2028)

Looking further ahead, BNB Chain is designing a next-generation trading chain to support extreme performance requirements.

Key objectives include:

• Targeting approximately 1 million TPS, requiring sustained execution capacity of ~20 GGas per second
• Near-instant transaction confirmation, with a best-case target of 150ms
• A hybrid off-chain and onchain compute architecture using execution proofs and attestations
• Stronger decentralization through improved validator models and fault tolerance
• Best-in-class security and production reliability

The chain is designed to support advanced scenarios across AI, privacy, payments, and RWAs, while offering Web2-level user experience and developer-friendly tooling.

Migration and Continuity

A flexible migration path is planned to ensure continuity for existing assets and applications.

This includes:

• An opt-in asset bridge and migration portal
• Contract migration guidelines and compatibility layers where feasible
• Builders retain control over when and how they adopt new infrastructure.

Timeline and Milestones

Phase 0: Foundation and Architecture Lock (Now to +6 months)

• Define execution, finality, and hybrid compute models
• Lock asset, liquidity, and programming primitives

Phase 1: MVP Build (Now to +12 months)

• Core chain with instant confirmation UX
• High-throughput execution engine MVP
• Validator security baseline
• Asset creation and liquidity primitives
• Hybrid compute MVP
• Developer tooling and migration MVP

Closing

The 2026 tech roadmap reflects a continuation of disciplined execution.

BNB Chain has demonstrated its ability to operate reliably at scale under real-world conditions. The next phase focuses on ensuring that this performance remains sustainable, fair, and extensible as the network continues to grow.

This roadmap is built on production experience, not theory, and is designed to support the next stage of onchain activity with the same reliability users already expect today.

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