BNB Chain has activated its Jenner hardfork on the BNB Smart Chain Testnet, introducing three protocol upgrades aimed at improving payments, real-world assets, and DeFi on the network.
The headline feature is Payment Lane, introduced under BEP-703, which reserves 5% of every block’s gas for eligible payments by default. The mechanism is designed to ensure that simple BNB transfers do not get crowded out when on-chain activity surges, such as during memecoin launches or heavy bot-driven trading. Governance can increase the reservation up to a maximum of 10%.
Initially, only wallet-to-wallet BNB transfers automatically qualify for the dedicated payment lane. Stablecoins such as USDT and USDC do not yet qualify and must be added to an approved governance list, which currently has no entries. Payments can still compete for the remaining 95% of block capacity.
The second upgrade, BEP-706, lets smart contracts read block timestamps down to the millisecond instead of whole seconds. This is intended to support time-sensitive trading and DeFi applications where short-lived price windows matter. Developers must opt in, and older contracts using second-based timestamps will continue working as before. The change does not make block times faster.
The third component, BEP-702, lays the foundation for CAS20, the Compliant Asset Standard. CAS20 is designed for issuers of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets who need controls not natively offered by regular BEP-20 tokens. These include allowlists and blocklists, pause transfers, and separate roles for minting, burning, and seizing tokens. The underlying code ships with Jenner, but nobody can create CAS20 tokens yet because separate administrative activation through governance is required.
BNB Chain stated that the timing for the mainnet upgrade will be announced separately, with two of the three features requiring further governance activation. On testnet, block builders must now respect the payment reservation when assembling blocks, and upcoming governance votes will determine how quickly stablecoins gain access to the Payment Lane.
