BNB Chain Completes Upgrade and Launches Pascal Hard Fork: A New Era of EVM Compatibility and Speed

Key Takeaways:

• BNB Chain rolls out the Pascal hard fork with enhanced EVM compatibility.
• The next upgrades, Lorentz and Maxwell, will further reduce block times.
• This upgrade coincides with a surge in DEX activity across the network, driven by the growing popularity of memecoins.

BNB Chain has successfully implemented the Pascal hard fork, a major upgrade aimed at improving transaction efficiency and significantly enhancing compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The Pascal hard fork focuses on integrating Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 7702. This integration enables access to a range of advanced features, such as:

• Smart Contract Wallets: Once deployed, these wallets function as smart contracts, allowing gasless transactions, batched approvals, and easier asset swaps.
• Gas Abstraction: EIP-7702 aims to simplify gas fees for users.
• Grouping: Batch transactions can reduce transaction processing times and relieve network bottlenecks, as they allow users to group multiple transactions together.

This development is consistent with BNB Chain’s goal to appeal to a wider crowd, including both developers and regular users, who may consider transaction fees as an obstacle.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of EIP-7702 is the addition of smart contract wallets. These wallets function as smart contracts on a temporary basis, making transactions gasless and enabling batch approvals and more seamless asset swaps. This improvement not only streamlines the experience for users, but it allows developers building decentralized applications (dApps) more flexibility. For example, imagine a case where a user wants to make multiple trades on a DEX. With smart contract wallets, they could batch all those trades into a single transaction (saving time and gas fees). This upgrade is a matter of making blockchain technology more accessible and user-friendly for everyone.

Pascal hard fork is the first of many exciting roadmap developments from BNB Chain in 2025. The network has already targeted two further major upgrades:

• Lorentz (April 2025): This upgrade aims to reduce block times to a blazing-fast 1.5 seconds.
• Maxwell (June 2025): Maxwell goes further still, reducing block times to just 0.75 seconds.

BNB Chain’s continuous evolution is reinforced by these upgrades, solidifying its position as a powerful and versatile platform.

This will significantly improve transaction speed and overall network efficiency, and closer to our goal of being one of the most scalable, high-performance blockchains in the industry.

The Pascal hard fork comes at a time of boom in decentralized exchange (DEX) activity on BNB Chain. According to DeFiLlama, BNB Chain’s DEX volumes have surpassed those of both Ethereum and Solana.

The majority of this influx is due to the rise of memecoins that have fueled a burning trading activity on services like PancakeSwap. Mubarak, a turbaned “memecoin,” generated spectacular buzz and accounted for a significant part of the DEX uptick.

Related News: Mubarak Memecoin from Four Meme Launchpad Launches on Binance Alpha on BNB Chain

This flurry of activity is only visible in the numbers: weekly trading volume on BNB Chain is up almost 60% from just a few weeks ago, at $13.56 billion. That is a brand of growth that’s almost the opposite of rival networks, which have seen declines on average during the same time frame.

PancakeSwap, the BNB Chain-native DEX, has been visibly affected by the rise in memecoin trading and the general DEX frenzy. PancakeSwap has not only secured the number one spot but also surpassed Ethereum’s Uniswap, with around $2.7 billion in daily volume generated.

The Pascal hard fork includes a series of Binance Evolution Proposals (BEPs) that all work towards further optimizing the network:

• BEP-439 (EIP-2537): Propose precompiles, enabling BLS12-381 curve operations for efficient operations of BLS signature verification.
• BEP-440 (EIP-2935): Information regarding hashes of historical blocks will be stored in system contracts, thus providing better accessibility of historical information for stateless clients.
• BEP-441 (EIP-7702): Adds EIP-7702 to set EOA account code for smart contract wallet feature
• BEP-466 (EIP-7685): Compatible Block Formatting
• BEP-496 (EIP-7623): Increase calldata cost, providing opportunities to protect the network from denial of service attacks.

To adapt to the Pascal hard fork, node operators, validators, exchanges, and infrastructure providers have been urged to update their systems in preparation for the upgrade. Failure to do so could cause nodes to fall out of sync. Developers were reminded that their dApps must comply with the new transaction structure introduced in the Pascal hard fork.

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