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1. What is BNB Chain's NewL1 and why is a forum opening?
BNB Chain, the network behind BNB Smart Chain (BSC), has opened a community forum category for NewL1, a planned Layer 1 blockchain that the project announced in July 2026. The forum, highlighted again on October 19, is meant to collect feedback from developers and BNB holders on the design before a testnet launches, which the team has targeted for the end of 2026, with a mainnet to follow in early 2027.
NewL1 is described as an EVM-compatible base chain, meaning that applications written for Ethereum's virtual machine should be able to run on it with limited changes. Its intended uses are trading, payments and workloads driven by artificial intelligence, including autonomous trading agents that place orders without a person approving each one.
The announcement puts a public discussion stage ahead of the technical build. For a network whose token, BNB, sits among the largest digital assets by market value, decisions about consensus, privacy and economics affect a wide ecosystem of exchanges, wallets and decentralized applications, so the way feedback is gathered carries weight.
2. What performance targets has BNB Chain set?
The project has published three headline goals for NewL1. The first is preconfirmation times below 50 milliseconds, meaning a user would receive a near-instant signal that a transaction has been accepted for inclusion. The second is throughput above 100,000 transactions per second. The third is block finality in under one second, the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed.
BNB Chain says it intends to reach these numbers through optimized consensus and parallel execution, an approach in which transactions that do not touch the same data are processed at the same time rather than one after another. The design is also described as having no public mempool, the open waiting area where pending transactions are visible before they are included in a block.
These are targets rather than measured results. Throughput figures announced before a testnet exists often differ from what a live network achieves, because real-world conditions such as geographic distribution of validators, network congestion and complex smart contract activity tend to lower performance. The testnet will be the first practical check on whether the figures hold.
3. Why does the absence of a public mempool matter?
A public mempool lets anyone observe pending transactions, and that visibility is the basis of a practice known as front-running, in which a bot sees a large order and places its own ahead of it to profit from the price movement. On busy chains the practice costs ordinary traders money in the form of worse execution prices.
By designing NewL1 without a public mempool, BNB Chain is signalling that it wants to reduce this kind of exploitation. The choice is especially relevant to a chain aimed at trading, where small differences in execution quality add up, and to automated agents, whose strategies can be copied or exploited if their pending orders are exposed.
Hiding pending transactions is not a complete solution. Whoever orders transactions inside a block still has influence over outcomes, so the way the network selects and sequences them will matter. These are the type of questions the community forum is expected to raise.
4. What privacy and compliance features are planned?
Coverage of the July announcement says NewL1 would include native privacy features, such as confidential transactions and selective disclosure designed to support compliance. Selective disclosure allows a user to keep transaction details hidden from the public while still proving specific facts to a regulator, auditor or counterparty when required.
Privacy has become a contested design area across the industry. Fully public ledgers expose the financial activity of every participant, which many businesses regard as unacceptable for payments or treasury operations. At the same time, regulators in many jurisdictions expect virtual asset service providers to meet anti-money-laundering obligations, which pure anonymity makes difficult.
A model that conceals data by default but permits targeted disclosure is an attempt to satisfy both sides. How BNB Chain implements it, and which parties would hold the ability to reveal information, are details that holders and developers can examine as the design progresses.
5. What is a Layer 1 and why build another one?
A Layer 1 is the base blockchain on which transactions are finally settled, as opposed to a Layer 2 that batches activity and posts it back to a base chain. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and BNB Smart Chain are all examples of Layer 1 networks, each making different trade-offs between speed, cost, decentralization and security.
Projects build new base chains when they believe the existing design cannot deliver the properties their target users need. In BNB Chain's case the stated needs are very fast confirmation, very high throughput and built-in privacy, which are difficult to add to a network already carrying a large volume of live applications without risking disruption.
The trade-off is that a new chain starts without the liquidity, tooling and user habits of an established one. Attracting developers and capital is typically harder than designing the software, which is one reason the project is consulting its community at this stage.
6. What do latency and finality mean for users?
Latency is the delay between a user submitting a transaction and learning that it has been accepted. Finality is the later point at which the transaction is permanent. On many networks the two are separated by seconds or even minutes, which is tolerable for transfers but awkward for trading, where prices move continuously.
A preconfirmation under 50 milliseconds would be faster than a human blink, and sub-second finality would mean a trade could be treated as settled almost immediately. For payments, that speed would bring the experience closer to a card tap than to a typical blockchain transfer. For market makers, it would shorten the window in which they carry the risk of an unsettled position.
Reaching those figures in practice depends on validators being well connected and on the network staying stable under load. Small, geographically concentrated validator groups can achieve impressive speeds at the expense of decentralization, so observers will look at how many validators NewL1 will run and who can join them.
7. How does NewL1 differ from earlier BNB Chain scaling work?
BNB Chain has previously extended its capacity with a Layer 2 network, opBNB, which launched in 2023. A Layer 2 inherits security from a base chain while processing transactions off to the side. NewL1 is different in kind: it is intended to be a separate base layer with its own consensus rather than a scaling add-on to BSC.
The distinction has practical consequences. A new base chain needs its own validator set, its own security assumptions and a path for moving assets between it and the existing network. Projects that already operate on BSC would have to decide whether to deploy there, and users would need tools to move funds across.
EVM compatibility is intended to ease that decision. Because developers can reuse familiar code and tools, the cost of testing NewL1 is lower than it would be for a chain with an entirely new programming model.
8. Why is the target workload AI trading agents?
The inclusion of autonomous AI trading agents among NewL1's target uses reflects a wider trend in which blockchain projects pitch themselves as infrastructure for software that transacts on its own. Agents operate continuously, send large numbers of small transactions and are sensitive to latency, which matches the low-latency, high-throughput profile BNB Chain is promising.
It also raises the stakes for fairness and security. An agent that trades on behalf of a user needs predictable execution and protection from being exploited by faster or better-informed participants. A chain built for that audience has to demonstrate that its ordering rules do not favor insiders.
For BNB holders the commercial logic is that more activity on the new chain would use the BNB token, though how much and in what form depends on economic design choices that remain open for discussion.
9. What should BNB holders watch?
For holders of BNB, the main points of interest are economic rather than technical. The more a new chain relies on the BNB token for fees, the more its usage could matter to demand for the asset, but that link depends on design decisions that have not been finalized and on whether applications and users actually arrive.
Holders can also follow how governance of the project develops. A community forum is a way to propose and debate ideas, yet it does not by itself decide outcomes, so it is worth watching which suggestions the core team adopts and how it explains the ones it rejects.
Finally, security deserves attention. Any new base chain begins with an untested codebase, and the first months of operation are when bugs and exploits are most likely to surface. A thorough testnet period and independent audits are standard expectations before significant funds move onto a network like this.
10. What happens next for NewL1?
The next milestone is the testnet that BNB Chain has said it plans to ship by the end of 2026. That release should allow developers to measure real latency and throughput against the published targets and to test the privacy tools and any bridging between networks.
Mainnet is expected in early 2027. Between now and then, observers will watch three things: whether the performance numbers survive contact with a live testnet, how much of the community feedback gathered in the forum changes the final design, and how the project handles the trade-off between privacy and regulatory expectations.
Because development remains ongoing, the specifications described so far could change. Readers following the project should treat the current figures as the team's goals and look for updates from BNB Chain's official channels as the testnet date approaches.