Following a full year of zero downtime in 2025, BNB Chain has unveiled its 2026 Tech Roadmap, outlining a push toward what it describes as “exchange-grade” performance, native privacy, and AI-driven infrastructure.
The plan builds directly on a year of aggressive scaling and reliability milestones, positioning the network for a new phase focused on high-frequency trading, advanced execution, and protocol-level privacy.
The roadmap rests on technical progress achieved throughout 2025, a year that tested BNB Chain under sustained load. During peak periods, the network processed as many as 31 million daily transactions, a level reached on October 5, 2025, while consuming up to 5 trillion gas per day. Despite this activity, the chain recorded zero downtime across the entire year.
Performance improvements were equally notable. Block times were reduced from 3 seconds to 0.45 seconds, while finality dropped to just 1.125 seconds. On the cost side, average gas prices fell sharply from 1 gwei to 0.05 gwei. At the same time, protocol-level and infrastructure changes reduced malicious MEV activity by an estimated 95%, improving fairness and execution quality for users and traders.
For 2026, BNB Chain is explicitly framing its evolution around trading performance. One of the headline targets is extreme throughput, with a goal of reaching 20,000 transactions per second and sub-second finality during 2026. Longer term, the roadmap points to an aspirational target of 1 million TPS by 2028.
Finality speed is also a central focus. The chain aims to push confirmations below 150 milliseconds, a level that would place it closer to centralized exchange infrastructure than traditional blockchains. Achieving this would significantly reduce latency for trading, arbitrage, and real-time applications built directly on-chain.
A major shift in the 2026 roadmap is the introduction of native, compliance-friendly privacy. Rather than relying on external tools, BNB Chain plans to support private token transfers and smart contract calls directly at the protocol level, designed to balance user confidentiality with regulatory requirements.
AI integration is another pillar of the roadmap. The chain plans to introduce a standardized AI Agent Framework, including a payment abstraction layer and an on-chain agent registry. This structure is intended to support autonomous agents that can transact, interact with smart contracts, and pay for execution without manual intervention.
Several upgrades are already scheduled. The Fermi hardfork, set for January 14, 2026, will activate on mainnet and further optimize block times and execution efficiency. Shortly after, the Fourier upgrade, planned for January 2026, aims to cut opBNB block times down to 250 milliseconds.
On the infrastructure side, BNB Chain is moving toward a production-ready, Rust-based validator client built on a Reth architecture. This shift is designed to improve single-core performance and speed up node synchronization. Storage is also being re-engineered through a multi-layered sharding approach, allowing the network to handle exponential state growth without sacrificing performance.
Parallel execution is another focus area. By leveraging EIP-7928 (BAL) for conflict-less parallel processing and redesigning storage systems for concurrent access, the chain aims to unlock higher throughput while maintaining deterministic execution.
Taken together, the 2026 roadmap signals a clear strategic direction for BNB Chain: moving beyond basic scalability toward infrastructure capable of supporting high-frequency trading, privacy-aware applications, and autonomous AI agents. While many of the targets are ambitious, the progress achieved in 2025 provides a concrete foundation for the next phase of development.
