The ‘Next-Generation Trading Chain’: BNB Chain Eyes 2026 Optimization Following Strong Ecosystem Momentum

After a defining year for the ecosystem, the BNB Chain is stepping up its efforts to build on its 2025 momentum and continue scaling its performance, execution capacity, and infrastructure strength amid sustained usage growth.

BNB Chain 2025 Technical Outcomes Pave The Way

On Monday, the BNB Chain shared its Tech Roadmap 2026, outlining plans to continue operating at a large scale while supporting sustained growth across trading activity, stablecoins, and real-world assets (RWA).

The roadmap noted that 2025 was a “defining year” for the ecosystem, with major milestones achieved without downtime. As they explained, the BNB chain focused on reliability, speed, cost efficiency, and fairness as the four core technical priorities of the year.

“These goals translated into tangible network outcomes,” the BNB Chain affirmed, highlighting a 40.5% increase in total value locked (TVL), a 150% year-over-year (YoY) growth in daily transactions, a surge in trading volume and stablecoin market capitalization, and reaching the highest daily active users across blockchains.

A recent report by CoinDesk Research pointed out that the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) leads the pack in stablecoin annual growth, soaring 133% YoY. The BSC significantly contributed to the surge in DEX volume, with its annual DEX trading volume surging by over 100% in 2025.

The network also overtook Solana and Ethereum in daily volume during peak periods, capturing nearly 30% of the total DEX market share at one point. Meanwhile, the BNB Chain also led in app revenue growth YoY, increasing 48%.

At the protocol level, the roadmap emphasized that BNB Chain’s performance improvements were driven by four major hardforks, which reduced block time from 3 seconds to 0.45 seconds and finality from 7.5 seconds to 1.125 seconds, while doubling network bandwidth to 133 million gas per second.

Following these changes, the network has “consistently handled up to 5 trillion gas used per day, equivalent to approximately 238 million native transfers.” Meanwhile, gas Price dropped roughly 20 times, from 1Gwei to 0.05Gwei.

Building The ‘Next-Generation’ Trading Chain

Now, the BNB Chain is working on multiple network optimizations in 2026 to establish the BSC as a “highly optimized EVM trading chain.” It seeks to achieve 20,000 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second finality, further reduce gas fees through software optimizations, and push finality deeper into sub-second territory with advanced consensus and network latency improvements.

The BNB Chain plans to make enhancements for a “performance-optimized” EVM execution engine. These include a new execution engine “focused on best-in-class single-core performance using register-based interpretation and AOT/JIT techniques,” and “conflict-less parallel execution during block chasing using EIP-7928 (BAL).”

The network is also planning to redesign storage systems for parallel-friendly access and continue developing middleware to reduce complexity for advanced applications, such as a privacy framework and an AI agent framework.

In addition, the BNB Chain shared a long-term plan to design the “next-generation trading chain to support extreme performance requirements” between 2026 and 2028.

The main goals include targeting approximately 1 million TPS, requiring sustained execution capacity of ~20 GGas per second; achieving near-instant transaction confirmation, with a best-case target of 150m; adopting a hybrid off-chain and on-chain compute architecture using execution proofs and attestations; strengthening decentralization through improved validator models and fault tolerance; and delivering best-in-class security and production reliability.

“The next phase focuses on ensuring that this performance remains sustainable, fair, and extensible as the network continues to grow,” the roadmap concluded.