BNB Chain is working on a new layer-1 blockchain designed for agent-based trading and transactions. The project aims to bring transaction pre-confirmation below 50 milliseconds and make front-running attacks harder by operating without a public mempool.
The new chain will run alongside the existing BNB Chain infrastructure. According to The Block, the project is part of a technical roadmap covering the second half of 2026. It has been under development for months and is now being shared in this level of detail for the first time. The testnet is planned for the end of 2026, while the mainnet is expected to go live in the first months of 2027.
The goal of the project is to offer an experience close to centralized exchanges while allowing users to retain control of their own assets when trading on a decentralized platform.
The Gap With Centralized Exchanges Is Not Closing, but It Is Narrowing
BNB Chain Chief Technology Officer David Z said a centralized matching engine can operate within microseconds, but no real-world trader actually feels that speed. According to him, round-trip times for co-located market makers remain in the single-digit millisecond range, while the delay is even longer for other users. A pre-confirmation time below 50 milliseconds matches the range that a typical exchange user actually experiences.
Z acknowledged that centralized exchanges still lead in co-located high-frequency trading. “For co-located HFT, CEX still wins today. For everyone else, this is a CEX-like experience without custody risk,” he said.
Mempool-Free Architecture
A feature called TxStream routes transactions directly to the block leader instead of sending them to a public mempool. According to Z, this removes the window in which an attacker could see a pending transaction and build a sandwich attack around it, because ordering is locked before the transaction becomes publicly known.
This design raises the question of whether the block leader itself creates a monopoly or censorship risk. Z said validators rotate every 200 milliseconds and that this period is not long enough for any validator to build a business around its position. “TxStream does not eliminate MEV. Nothing can. It makes the dominant attack types practically ineffective,” he said.
A second component called PriorityLane reserves block space for oracle, liquidation and bridge transactions through an on-chain managed mechanism.
BNB Chain said it is targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second and sub-second block finality through jointly optimized consensus, parallel execution and LtHash-based storage. These figures are still targets for a chain that has not yet reached testnet.
The Bottleneck Is in the Execution Layer
Z said the performance gap is not in consensus or storage, but in the execution layer. He noted that popular smart contracts, such as a DEX swap or a token transfer, repeat the same operations millions of times. As a solution, the team is highlighting just-in-time compilation, known as JIT, and strength reduction methods, techniques that have been used in software development for decades.
Regarding the risk that the new chain could split liquidity with BSC, Z said an official native bridge will connect it to BSC, that BSC will remain the settlement hub, and that BNB will function as a unified asset across all chains. The new chain will become the fourth member of the BNB Chain family after BNB Smart Chain, opBNB and Greenfield.
The roadmap comes amid a broader competitive landscape in which projects such as Solana’s Firedancer, Monad and MegaETH are also trying to overcome execution-layer bottlenecks.
Quantum Security and H1 Data
BNB Chain is also running quantum-resistant security tests. Instead of replacing existing cryptography, the project is following a hybrid approach that adds a post-quantum protection layer on top of it. Z said no one in the industry has a full quantum migration plan yet, and that BNB Chain is no exception. He added that the lattice-based LtHash structure used for chain state integrity is already post-quantum today.
Updating the signature scheme without changing wallet addresses is a harder problem. Z described the “harvest-now-decrypt-later” scenario as an open issue for the entire industry. If the public key of any account has been exposed, that account could theoretically be at risk once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer emerges.
The roadmap also included data on BNB Smart Chain’s performance in the first half of 2026. The block interval dropped to 450 milliseconds, while reference throughput nearly doubled to approximately 5,200 transactions per second.
