BNB Chain published its second-half 2026 technical roadmap on Wednesday, with plans for a new Layer 1 blockchain built for high-frequency trading and AI agent transactions. The testnet is targeted for the end of 2026, and the mainnet is scheduled for early 2027.
The new chain is separate from BNB Smart Chain, which holds roughly $5 billion in total value locked. BNB Chain chief technology officer David Z told The Block the new network targets use cases the existing chain was not built for, rather than rehosting its mature DeFi ecosystem.
"The goal is growing the total BNB Chain pie, not re-slicing it," Z stated.
It would become the fourth network in BNB Chain's stack.
What the first half of 2026 actually delivered
The roadmap arrives alongside documented performance improvements on BNB Smart Chain. Block intervals fell from 750 milliseconds to 450 milliseconds in the first half of 2026. Benchmark throughput rose from approximately 2,800 transactions per second to 5,200, the equivalent of about 400 MGas/s. Memory finality came down from 1,125 milliseconds to 650 milliseconds.
Those gains came from four specific changes to BSC rather than a single update. A Block-Level Access List now pre-declares state access patterns to improve execution efficiency and support future parallel processing. An Incremental Snapshot feature enabled faster chain synchronization for new or lagging nodes. EVM SuperInstruction reduced interpreter overhead through the fusion of common opcode sequences. Extended Voting Rules strengthened the fast finality mechanism for consistency under adverse network conditions. The BSC Rust client also reached full Reth v2.0 compatibility, which BNB Chain said delivered a 2x performance improvement.
The architecture of the new chain
The new L1 targets throughput above 100,000 transactions per second through co-optimized consensus and parallel execution with LtHash-based storage, alongside sub-second block finality and transaction preconfirmation under 50 milliseconds. Those figures are design targets for a chain that has not yet reached testnet.
The central design decision is the removal of the public mempool. A feature called TxStream routes transactions directly to the block leader rather than through a publicly visible queue of pending trades. Z said that the execution layer is where the real performance gap lies.
"All smart contracts today need optimization directly at the execution layer," he said. "The chains got fast at consensus and storage, but the execution engine itself still works like it's translating sentence by sentence."
When pending transactions are publicly visible, an attacker can observe a trade and construct a sandwich attack before confirmation. With TxStream, Z said, ordering is committed before the trade becomes visible, which removes that window entirely. He was direct about the limits of that claim.
"TxStream doesn't eliminate MEV. Nothing does. It makes the dominant attacks impractical by design," he said.
Block leaders rotate every 200 milliseconds, and sub-50-millisecond commitments make ordering behavior publicly auditable.
A second mechanism, PriorityLane, would reserve block space for time-critical services including oracles and liquidations, governed on-chain.
Quantum security and what remains unresolved
BNB Chain's roadmap separately addresses quantum-resistant security through a hybrid approach that layers post-quantum protection over existing cryptography rather than replacing it. The stated goal is to let users adopt quantum-safe protection without changing wallet addresses or disrupting existing applications. The work remains at the research stage.
Z identified harvest-now-decrypt-later as an open problem across the industry. Any account whose public key has been exposed is theoretically vulnerable once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer exists, and no protocol design retroactively fixes that exposure. The chain's LtHash state commitment makes its state integrity post-quantum today, but account migration remains unresolved.
Z said that keeping a wallet address stable while the signature scheme changes means binding the address to an upgradeable authentication policy rather than to a single key. BNB Chain's account abstraction is designed for that approach but has not finalized it.
"Quantum computing will keep evolving, and so will our testing and research," the roadmap states. "The point is that when it matures, BNB Chain's infrastructure is already prepared."
Jordan V.
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