BNB Chain had a huge year in 2025, and this time it wasn’t just speculation driving the growth. According to a year-end recap from CoinMarketCap, major upgrades made the network faster, cheaper, and easier to use, and users showed up in record numbers.
Two big updates did most of the heavy lifting. The Lorentz upgrade in April and the Maxwell upgrade in June brought in parallel execution, letting the network handle many transactions at the same time. That single change made a massive difference.
Block times dropped from about three seconds to under one second, landing near 0.75 seconds, with a future goal of 0.25 seconds. At the same time, transaction fees fell by roughly 98%. In simple terms: things got way faster and way cheaper.
And people noticed.
By December, BNB Chain was seeing around 4.8 million daily active users and processing more than 15 million transactions every day.
A big part of that activity came from meme trading and derivatives. The launch of four.meme in October brought in a wave of new users and briefly generated more daily revenue than Solana’s Pump.fun. At its peak, BNB Chain ranked number one among Layer-1 networks for DEX volume, with over 100,000 new traders joining in just one week.
Perpetuals trading also took off. The Aster platform pulled in more than two million users, adding even more volume to the network.
Another boost came from a gasless stablecoin promotion. BNB Chain covered gas fees for stablecoin transfers, making payments friction-free. The promo, which runs through January 2026, helped push weekly stablecoin volume higher and more than doubled stablecoin supply on the network.
All this activity helped push BNB to a new all-time high in October, breaking above the four-digit price mark. At the same time, regular quarterly burns continued. Between the 30th and 33rd burns, about 6.25 million BNB was permanently removed from circulation.
CoinMarketCap summed it up clearly: BNB Chain’s growth in 2025 was structural, not speculative. Faster execution, meme tokens acting as a gateway for new users, and cheaper, smoother stablecoin payments created real usage—not just short-term hype.
