BNB Chain Unveils New High-Performance L1 Plan: Targets 200ms Block Time and 20ms Preconfirmation, Operating Parallel to BSC Without Issuing a New Token
Author: TechFlow
TechFlow Overview: Facing relentless pressure from high-performance public chains in perpetual contracts, ultra-high-frequency matching, and AI agent scenarios, BNB Chain quietly released its official developer documentation outlining a brand-new technological blueprint codenamed “New L1”. This high-performance public chain, built specifically for extreme speed and high concurrency, will run parallel to the existing BSC, featuring 200-millisecond block times and 20-millisecond pre-confirmation. Binance founder CZ subsequently shared this information, establishing the tone of “Multiple chains, one coin,” which clearly alleviates concerns about issuing new coins and fragmenting liquidity. Drawing on official first-hand technical documents, this article deeply deconstructs the underlying architecture, engineering innovations, and evolution timeline of the new L1.
Dual-Track Parallelism Drives Innovation: Why Does BNB Chain Need a New L1?
The competitive landscape of public chain infrastructure is undergoing dramatic shifts. As an ecosystem giant holding hundreds of billions in legacy funds and massive user bases, BNB Smart Chain (BSC) has long hosted the network's largest general-purpose DeFi, liquidity pools, and application interactions. However, due to years of high-load operation accumulating an enormously large historical state tree, the node hardware load and I/O read/write pressures on BSC are intensifying, making it difficult to aggressively increase speed without compromising existing security.
Against this backdrop, merely patching the existing network can no longer meet the stringent demands of on-chain high-frequency finance. Facing the encroachment by high-throughput public chains like Solana, Sui, and Aptos, as well as order-book-specific chains like Hyperliquid in the perpetual contract arena, BNB Chain must adopt a lightweight, ultra-responsive pure execution base. The newly released “New L1” plan in the official BNB Chain developer documentation arises precisely for this purpose, with its core mission focusing exclusively on high-speed matching, on-chain order books, real-time payments, and AI agent workflows.
The launch of the new L1 is not intended to overthrow or replace BSC, but rather adopts a carefully considered “dual-track parallel” architecture. BSC will continue to defend the general smart contract position, providing deep liquidity and a high-security moat for mature DeFi; the new L1 serves as a lightweight, specialized high-speed track to handle cutting-edge financial applications highly sensitive to latency. The two chains are tightly stitched together via the official native bidirectional cross-chain bridge, ensuring free scheduling of assets and states and avoiding the liquidity fragmentation common in multi-chain ecosystems.
Ultra-Fast 200ms Block Time and 20ms Pre-Confirmation: Four Core Engineering Breakthroughs
At the underlying consensus mechanism level, the new L1 demonstrates radical engineering breakthroughs, significantly compressing the block interval to 200 milliseconds. The network adopts a deeply modified Parlia PoSA and BLS Fast Finality Consensus Specification, incorporating rotating validators and cross-block BLS fast finality voting to firmly lock transaction ordering certainty within 1 second. Even more groundbreaking is the protocol's invention of the SubBlocks mechanism, allowing nodes to push transaction pre-confirmations via WebSocket data streams at an extremely high frequency of approximately 20 milliseconds, providing quant market makers with near-centralized exchange-level ultra-fast feedback.
To completely eliminate block time bottlenecks caused by complex contract computations in traditional EVM virtual machines, the new L1 discloses in its Async Execution design specification that transaction ordering is completely removed from the critical execution path. Consensus nodes can directly package and broadcast blocks immediately after completing transaction ordering and reaching consensus, without synchronously waiting for smart contract execution results prior to block production. State transitions are handled asynchronously in the background using Reth and Revm pipelines, rendering transaction queue congestion obsolete and unlocking exponential network throughput capacity.
At the data storage and state read-write level, the new L1 completely abandons the Merkle-Patricia Trie (MPT) architecture that has been used since Ethereum's inception. According to the LtHash Lattice Accumulative State Database (State DB) documentation, the new chain's underlying layer adopts a flat key-value storage model and introduces a state commitment mechanism based on Lattice Hash (LtHash). This reconstruction not only drastically eliminates the node disk I/O amplification losses caused by traditional state trees, but also significantly improves state verification efficiency under massive concurrent transactions, laying a solid foundation for a future single-block 600 million Gas limit.
Native Account Abstraction and Privacy Pools: Killer Primitives Embedded in the Protocol Foundation
Beyond the extreme leap in block time speed, the new L1 brings revolutionary primitives to developer and user experience. The protocol defines a brand-new transaction encapsulation type in its native 0x76 Account Abstraction technical standard, directly embedding account abstraction into the consensus layer. Users can directly utilize smartphone-built-in Passkey (WebAuthn/P256) hardware keys to complete biometric signatures, freeing themselves from the struggle between mnemonic phrases and complex private keys. Meanwhile, the network natively supports Gas payment sponsorship and batch calls. Each transaction supports atomic execution of up to 64 operations and operates completely independently of external Bundlers.
To satisfy the on-chain privacy needs of compliant institutions and high-net-worth crypto users, the new L1 also natively embeds a zk-SNARKs-based privacy pool within its Zero-Knowledge Shielded Pool design scheme. Developers and regular users can choose to deposit assets into protected privacy pools as needed, completely hiding the sender, recipient, and transaction amounts while completing on-chain transfers and interactions. As a native protocol option, this function not only eliminates the compliance flaws associated with third-party privacy mixers, but also does not interfere with the smooth operation of mainnet regular transparent transactions.
CZ Clarifies "Multiple Chains, One Coin": Reshaping BNB Value Capture and Economic Settlement
Whenever a major public chain ecosystem announces a new chain plan, the most acute and vigilant question from the community is invariably, "Will they issue a new token diluting existing stakes?" In response to the discussion wave sparked by the developer documentation, Binance founder CZ immediately retweeted and established the tone: “Multiple chains, one coin.” This concise and resolute statement instantly dispelled market concerns, officially confirming that the new L1 will absolutely not issue a second-generation token. All ecosystem consensus and capital liquidity will continue to be firmly anchored on BNB.
Fig: CZ clarifies “Multiple chains, one coin” in a post regarding the new L1
In terms of economic models and token empowerment loops, the existing BNB will directly span and permeate the dual-track network composed of BSC and the new L1. Whether on BSC or the new L1, BNB serves as the sole Gas payment medium, validator staking asset, and full-ecosystem governance voting credential. Any surge in high-frequency trading, market-making matching, and agent interactions on the new L1 will directly translate into burning and staking demand for BNB, building a more resilient deflationary engine for the token asset.
Notably, the new L1 adopts an extremely rigorous anti-abuse design in its Gas economics. According to the BEP-222 specification, the new chain’s base network fee is permanently fixed at 0, with transaction fees entirely governed by priority fees. More critically, due to the network’s “order-first, execute-later” decoupled model, users must pay in full according to their declared Gas Limit, with no refunds for unused portions. This rigid constraint mechanism will effectively force institutions and quantitative developers to accurately estimate resources, completely eliminating arbitrage attacks that maliciously occupy bandwidth through inflated Gas declarations.
Evolution Roadmap and Industry Competitive Landscape: Countering Solana and Dedicated Trading Chains
From a macro industry competition perspective, the focal point of game theory in the public chain sector is shifting comprehensively toward ultra-fast financial infrastructure. Solana has captured significant mindshare in decentralized derivatives and token issuance tracks thanks to its parallel execution, Move-based public chains like Sui and Aptos advance steadily into microsecond-level latency, and dedicated L1s like Hyperliquid are eroding traditional public chains' derivatives trading volume through full-stack on-chain matching. BNB Chain's proactive move to deploy the new L1 this time is precisely an offensive counterattack aimed at this core battlefield.
Regarding development and implementation progress, according to the developer guide for migrating from BSC to New L1, the internal multi-validator devnet is currently progressing steadily, and local development environment guides and core interface specifications for developers are ready. Following the set roadmap, BNB Chain expects to open its public testnet to the global community and ecosystem projects by the end of 2026, striving for a full mainnet launch in early 2027. At that time, a brand-new multi-chain landscape combining 200-millisecond ultra-fast experiences, native account abstraction, and a unified BNB value moat will be fully unveiled.