TL;DR:

• We’re bringing together the speed and simplicity of a CEX with the freedom, access, and ownership of a decentralized chain.
• In H1 2025, we reduced block time to 0.75s, finality to 1.875s, dropped average gas fees to $0.01, and cut malicious MEV by 95%—pushing toward a faster, fairer onchain experience.
• We’re making BNB Chain up to 20x more powerful. Enabling the chain to handle far more transactions, run faster, and support bigger apps by introducing a Rust-based client, super instructions, and StateDB improvements.
• We are calling for a proposal for a next-gen L1 designed to rival centralized platforms—delivering sub-150ms finality, 20K+ TPS for complex transactions, onchain compute hubs, and native privacy for over 200 million users.
• This is more than an upgrade, it’s the future of blockchain. 

Back to the Beginning

What started as a Cosmos-based DEX chain evolved into a powerful dual-chain system, and today BNB Chain stands as a high-performance, community-driven blockchain ecosystem with L1s, L2s, and decentralized data infrastructure.

But our mission hasn’t changed: give users the ability to trade, build and own without barriers.

As we move into the next era of BNB Chain, that mission is only getting stronger. We’re building a new blockchain that delivers the speed and simplicity of a centralized exchange whilst staying true to what makes blockchain powerful: open access, self-custody, and freedom.

2025 So Far: Key Achievements

At the start of 2025, we set out to do three things:

• Make transactions faster - sub-seconds, not seconds.
• Make usage cheaper - aiming to achieve gasless transactions.
• And make trading fairer - by eliminating malicious MEV.

We’ve already delivered on these promises over the last 6 months:

Performance Upgrades

Through two major hardforks, Lorentz and Maxwell, we cut block time from 3 seconds to 0.75 seconds and finality from 7.5 seconds to 1.875 seconds. Network bandwidth more than doubled to 100 million gas per second and, since then, BNB Chain has effortlessly handled:

• 12.4 million daily transactions.
• $9.3 billion in daily average trading volume.
• A record 17.6 million transactions in one day.

Cost Efficiency

Gas fees dropped to a median of $0.01, making it affordable to interact even during peak periods.

Fairness & Security

Maclicious MEV attacks were slashed by 95%, thanks to builders across the Goodwill Alliance.

These aren’t just technical wins, they’re user wins. We’re proving that CEX-level speed and UX can live on a fully decentralized blockchain.

Goals for the rest of 2025: Powering Thousands of Swaps per Second

In the second half of 2025, we're scaling BNB Chain to handle more users, more apps, and more real-time activity than ever before. By increasing the block gas limit to 1G, x10 times the current capacity, we’re preparing the chain to support high-volume onchain use, including up to 5,000 DEX swaps per second.

This upgrade is all about making sure performance keeps up with demand, so builders can scale freely and users can transact instantly, even in the busiest moments.

Here’s how we’re making it happen:

1. Faster, Smarter Infrastructure with Rust

To support 10–20x more throughput, BNB Chain needs a more powerful engine under the hood. That’s why we’re introducing a new Rust-based client with BSC customizations that’s built for scale, speed, and efficiency.

Based on Ethereum’s Reth, this custom, multi-threaded client improves memory usage, accelerates node syncing, and lays the foundation for high-performance execution at scale.

2. Smarter Execution for Complex Transactions

We're improving how smart contracts run on BNB Chain by introducing Super Instructions, which combine multiple common operations into a single, optimized action. This upgrade removes key performance bottlenecks in areas like DEX swaps and launchpad events, making complex interactions faster and more efficient.

3. Faster State Access for Larger Throughput and Dataset

The StateDB is the interface and cache layer that bridge the EVM and storage system in BSC and hence play a vital role in contract execution performance. Our research found ~30% execution time of BSC was spent on state access. The optimizations of StateDB will help reduce the occurrence of duplicated state accessing and speed up the cache accessing performances for the much larger dataset. 

Looking Ahead: Next-Gen BNB Chain (2026 and beyond)

BNB Chain has undergone multiple evolutions since its inception, from a Cosmos-based DEX chain to a dual-chain Ethereum-compatible model with L1, L2 and decentralized data infrastructure.

But to achieve our next goal of providing a CEX like experience to serve millions of users, it’s clear that our current architecture faces natural limits. This comes as there’s been a wave of liquidity from centralized exchanges and traditional finance flowing onchain so we’re aiming to build the infrastructure to handle it.

It’s time to build the next-generation BNB Chain from the ground up.

This next-generation chain will not only facilitate advanced asset creation but also deliver performance that competes with centralized exchanges, such as Binance, and TradFi platforms, like Nasdaq.

Here’s what’s coming:

Near-Instant Transaction Confirmation

No more waiting for your transactions to go through. With BNB Chain’s next-gen upgrade, transactions will be confirmed in under 150 milliseconds. That means whether you're trading, swapping, or interacting with an app, it's done almost instantly.

Nasdaq-Level Speed, Built for DeFi

BNB Chain’s next evolution will match the scale and speed of global exchange networks like Nasdaq. With the ability to process over 20,000 transactions per second for complex onchain actions like swaps, restaking, or yield strategies. 

This performance leap is driven by a new, upgradable virtual machine designed for massive parallel execution. It will go beyond the limits of today’s EVM, with support for next-gen architectures or entirely new VMs purpose-built for high-performance applications.

Privacy That Works for Everyone

BNB Chain will introduce native privacy features for both token transfers and smart contract calls and enable compliance-friendly confidentiality at the protocol level. Meaning users and developers will be able to interact privately and securely with native privacy features for transactions and smart contract calls.

Web2-Level Simplicity, Web3-Level Control

The next phase of BNB Chain will make onchain access as intuitive as logging into your favorite app, while still giving you full control of your assets. Native support for multi-signature wallets, key rotation, and seamless authentication flows will bring familiar UX to decentralized systems.

Build the Future Together

BNB Chain may have evolved over the years, but its core mission hasn’t changed since the early days of the Binance DEX chain: give billions of users the power to trade, build and own without barriers. 

As we make the next step towards this next-gen blockchain, we recognize that this future cannot be built alone. That’s why we’re inviting developers, researchers, and ecosystem partners to join us as we shape the next generation of blockchain infrastructure.

We’re not just building faster chains, we’re building the infrastructure for a freer financial system.

And we’re only just getting started.