Binance Smart Chain Overtakes Solana & Ethereum in Key DeFi Battle – Here’s Why It Matters

Move over, Ethereum—there's a new DeFi heavyweight in town. Binance Smart Chain just flipped both SOL and ETH in a critical metric that reveals where the smart money's flowing. And no, it's not just because of cheaper gas fees.

The underdog chain's surge proves institutional players will trade decentralization for cost efficiency every damn time. Watch for ETH maximalists to dismiss this as 'low-quality volume' while quietly sweating over their node operations.

One cynical take? This is what happens when you let crypto degens vote with their wallets—elegant tech loses to brute-force utility. Game on.

Binance Smart Chain’s daily decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume placed it ahead of all other blockchains with respect to this metric.

Notably, this occurred with the layer-1 blockchain surging ahead of solana and Ethereum.

This data was recorded after the protocol completed its Maxwell upgrade, which went live on June 30.

The upgrade introduced changes to reduce block times and improve validator coordination.

Binance Smart Chain DEX Volume Hits Record Levels

Binance Smart Chain’s surge in DEX activity placed it ahead of other major blockchains by a wide margin.

According to the chart from DeFiLlama, BSC’s 24-hour DEX volume was over three times higher than that of Solana and more than four times that of Ethereum.

According to the 30-day volume data, BSC recorded $172.408 billion in total trading. Solana recorded $61.944 billion, while ethereum came in at $56.429 billion.

These figures placed Binance Smart Chain firmly at the top in both short-term and month-long activity.

The largest driver behind this high volume was PancakeSwap, the top DEX on BNB Chain.

PancakeSwap alone contributed a major share of the platform’s DEX activity during the period.

The chart also showed lower trading figures for other chains such as Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon.

None of them crossed even $30 billion in 30-day volume. BSC’s wide lead signaled a strong DeFi presence, supported by the recent network upgrades.

The fact that Binance Smart Chain saw a higher DEX volume is a significant twist, especially since its DeFi TVL lags behind those of Solana and Ethereum.

While this shift may be temporary, it also shows the dynamic nature of the DeFi world.

Maxwell Upgrade Speeds Up Network Performance

According to reports, the Maxwell upgrade was launched on June 30 as a hard fork on the BNB Smart Chain.

It reduced block times from 1.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds. This marked the second time in 2025 that the network reduced its block time by half.

Earlier in April, BNB Chain implemented the Lorentz upgrade, which cut block times from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds.

The Maxwell upgrade built upon this by including three major changes: BEP-524, BEP-563, and BEP-564.

BEP-524 shortened the time between blocks. Also, the BEP-563 proposal improved validator communication.

BEP-564 introduced new message types to help validators synchronize data more efficiently.

These upgrades improved transaction speed, finality, and overall responsiveness.

The report indicated that BNB Chain noted that finality could now be achieved in about 1.875 seconds.

Similarly, the lower latency is expected to benefit DeFi users and developers building decentralized applications (DApps).

BNB Price Shows Strength Amid Network Growth

The price of Binance Coin (BNB) rose in tandem with the increase in DeFi activity and network enhancements.

As of July 2, BNB price traded at around $664. This was up 2.62% over the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

The broader market data also shows that BNB’s market cap stood at $93.55 billion. As of the time of writing, it had a 24-hour trading volume of $1.47 billion.

It is worth noting that the total and circulating supply remained at 140.88 million BNB.

Analysts attributed the rise in Binance Coin’s price to positive sentiment following the Maxwell upgrade and increasing demand for faster DeFi transactions.

The combination of higher trading activity and network upgrades could continue to influence BNB’s performance.

Binance Smart Chain’s position at the top of DEX volume charts suggests that it may retain its DeFi lead if activity remains strong.

Beyond the BSC DEX Update, Binance recently announced the expansion of trading options for Arbitrum.

Others, such as Livepeer and Ravencoin, were also included for new trading pairs and bot services.