BNB Chain has announced an ambitious technical overhaul targeting unprecedented blockchain performance metrics by 2026. The roadmap aims to achieve 20,000 transactions per second (TPS) for complex operations like DeFi swaps and yield strategies, coupled with sub-150 millisecond finality – positioning its throughput closer to traditional stock exchanges like Nasdaq than conventional blockchains.
Recent foundational upgrades in H1 2025 already reduced block times from 3 seconds to 0.75 seconds and achieved 1.875-second finality through Lorentz and Maxwell hard forks. These optimizations enabled $0.01 median gas fees, a 95% reduction in malicious MEV, and record network activity including 17.6 million daily transactions and $9.3 billion average daily trading volume.
Phase one enhancements by end-2025 will increase block gas limits tenfold to support 5,000 decentralized exchange swaps per second. Core innovations include a Rust-based client (derived from Ethereum's Reth) for improved memory efficiency, 'super instructions' for batched smart contract operations, and StateDB optimizations to eliminate redundant data processing.
The 2026 upgrade will introduce a new virtual machine architecture supporting parallel execution, bypassing EVM constraints to achieve institutional-grade scalability. Additional features include native privacy protocols and Web2-like onboarding flows designed to attract traditional finance liquidity where microsecond latency impacts profitability.