BNB Chain targets AI payments with 1M TPS and privacy push

BNB Chain is betting that a deeper technical overhaul can revive growth as BNB trades at its lowest level since October 2024. The token is down more than 35% this year to $563, while chain transactions fell 12.5% in the first quarter. Over the same period, Solana and Ethereum posted transaction growth of 46.4% and 38%.

To change that trajectory, the Binance-backed network wants to support markets that need much higher throughput than typical consumer apps: institutional settlement, high-frequency trading, and payments made by autonomous AI agents. BNB Chain has launched BNB Agent Studio and an SDK that connects with large language models and cloud services including AWS Bedrock, giving developers tools to deploy on-chain agents with built-in payment rails.

The longer-term plan is a new Layer 1 design that starts above 100,000 transactions per second and aims for 1 million TPS. Developers are also targeting sub-50 millisecond preconfirmations and finality in under one second. Proposed features include TxStream, which routes transactions directly to block leaders instead of a public mempool, and PriorityLane, which reserves block space for urgent actions like oracle updates and liquidations.

BNB Chain is also building native privacy features, including confidential transactions and selective disclosure, with zero-knowledge proofs expected to do much of the work. Testnet is planned for late 2026, with mainnet targeted for early 2027.