BNB Chain Aims to Shatter Speed Barriers: 150ms Finality & 20K TPS in Sight

BNB Chain isn't just chasing scalability—it's gunning for dominance. With ambitions of 150-millisecond finality and 20,000 transactions per second, the network is positioning itself as the Formula 1 of blockchain infrastructure.

Why settle for fast when you can be instantaneous?

The 150ms finality target would make BNB Chain one of the quickest Layer 1s—potentially outpacing even Visa's average settlement times. Meanwhile, the 20K TPS benchmark leaves Ethereum's current capacity in the dust (though let's see how those bankers like it when their "high-speed" trades get lapped by DeFi degens).

This isn't an upgrade—it's a warning shot across the bow of every sluggish "enterprise blockchain" still struggling to hit triple-digit TPS. The race for real-time finance just got interesting.

How BNB Chain is rebuilding the infrastructure layer

According to the blog post, the first half of 2025 marked a foundational shift for BNB Chain. Two major hard forks, Lorentz and Maxwell, reduced block times from 3 seconds to 0.75 seconds and lowered finality to 1.875 seconds, placing the network among a rare group capable of sub-second settlement.

Combined with a 95% drop in malicious MEV and median gas fees of $0.01, these upgrades are deliberate steps toward making decentralized trading as seamless as on centralized exchanges.

The numbers underscore the transformation: 12.4 million daily transactions, $9.3 billion in average daily trading volume, and a record 17.6 million transactions processed in a single day, all without the congestion or fee volatility seen on competing networks.

Now, the team is pushing further. By the end of 2025, BNB Chain plans to increase its block gas limit tenfold, enabling support for up to 5,000 decentralized exchange swaps per second.

To support this, engineers are rebuilding core infrastructure with three key innovations: a Rust-based client derived from Ethereum’s RETH for faster syncing and improved memory efficiency; “super instructions” that batch common smart contract operations; and StateDB optimizations to eliminate redundant data fetches.

But the real paradigm shift is coming in 2026. With a goal of sub-150ms finality and 20,000+ TPS for complex transactions like restaking or structured yield strategies, BNB Chain is aiming to become a Nasdaq-scale settlement LAYER for DeFi.

Per the blog post, a new virtual machine architecture will support parallel execution, bypassing EVM constraints. Meanwhile, native privacy features and Web2-like onboarding flows are designed to bridge the gap between institutional users and decentralized systems.