BNB Chain's New L1 Plan Adds No Token and Targets 200ms Blocks

BNB Chain has published a specification for a second layer-1 network that would run beside BNB Smart Chain and issue no token of its own. The documentation went up on 22 October. BNB pays the gas, does the staking and carries the votes on both chains, which are to be joined by a native bridge that is still being built. The project has no name; the working label in the documents is New L1. Changpeng Zhao, Binance's founder, summed the arrangement up in four words on Sunday.

Two renderings of four words

Zhao replied on X to a post about the plan on 25 October. crypto.news and COINOTAG both carry the line the same way, and COINOTAG states that it reproduces the post as written.

"Multiple chains, one coins," Zhao wrote.

TokenPost, filing several hours earlier, has the same post as "Multiple chains, one coin." One word apart, and nothing read here settles which is the posted text. The point survives either spelling. A second chain is coming and it will not bring a second asset with it.

What the specification promises

Targets first, since the documentation is clear that they are targets. Blocks every 200 milliseconds, pre-confirmation of a transaction in about 20 milliseconds, and finality on transaction order inside one second. COINOTAG notes that the document calls these development goals and not measured live performance. The design separates ordering from execution, so validators can agree on a block without waiting for every transaction in it to run. Consensus is an enhanced version of Parlia, the mechanism BNB Smart Chain already uses, with BLS voting added. A Multi-Lane mechanism reserves capacity for particular classes of traffic: high-frequency trading, on-chain order books and payment flows.

Pre-confirmations can be revoked, and applications moving irreversible value are told to wait for execution finality instead. Solidity contracts work; some Ethereum RPC methods and transaction types do not. Account abstraction is built in, which allows sponsored fees and batched operations. Sub-second finality is the bar chains are measuring themselves against this year, and Solana reached its own version when Alpenglow completed with 446 of 654 validators certifying.

The privacy layer is the least finished part

An optional shielded pool sits in the design. crypto.news and COINOTAG both say the documentation warns against using it with real funds. This desk did not open the October documentation. What it did read is the project's own forum post of 28 July introducing the layer, and that post carries no warning in those words. It describes the pool as a "genesis-predeployed, non-upgradeable system contract ShieldedPool(0x5000)", says it has no admin, and says governance can pause deposits but never withdrawals. It also lists what is unfinished. MEV and sandwich protection and a call-target allowlist are named as audit surfaces to settle before mainnet, the development ceremony's key material "is forgeable", and a mainnet ceremony "only replaces the trust root". No completed external audit appears in the post.

Nothing has launched

An internal devnet with multiple validators is producing blocks. A public testnet is targeted for the end of this year and mainnet for early 2027. Neither date is fixed. BNB Smart Chain keeps running in the meantime. Its Pasteur hard fork landed in August with bridge fixes, and crypto.news reports controlled tests around it lifting throughput from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second, while noting those results do not establish the same gains under live load. The chain's third-quarter figures, cited by crypto.news from a report dated 23 October, put tokenized stock transactions at about $25.6 billion and network revenue up 54% to $54.2 million. COINOTAG reproduces that set, which is one chain of reporting and not two.

What a second network does for holders of the one token is the thing the specification does not address. govBNB, minted one for one against staked BNB and non-transferable, carries voting rights and nothing else. The rest of the document describes machinery. No throughput figure in it has been measured in production, no date in it is binding, and the bridge that would carry BNB between the two chains has not been built.