The DeFi Big League, Why BNB Chain Is Set To Continue With Major Growth In 2025

Despite facing multiple instances of criticism since it was introduced in 2022, the BNB Chain ecosystem has grown to be one of the most vibrant on-chain economies within the DeFi market. At the core, this ecosystem comprises three main components; Binance Smart Chain (BSC) which operates as the smart contract layer and DeFi hub, opBNB which is designed as a high performance optimistic rollup and BNB Greenfield, a decentralized storage network. These different blockchain infrastructures have all played a significant role in the growth of the BNB Chain ecosystem to where it is today; for some context, the total value locked (TVL) on BSC currently stands at $5.5 billion while opBNB enjoys a TVL $25.21 million. One might be tempted to argue that these are rookie numbers compared to Ethereum which accounts for over half of the total DeFi TVL, but with Solana’s TVL at $7.2 billion - the BNB Chain ecosystem qualifies as a serious contender. The big question, however, is whether this momentum will hold in 2025? While it might be too early to predict BNB’s Chain trajectory, several pointers show the ecosystem will likely grow bigger this year. Last year’s growth figures were quite impressive as we will highlight in the next section; more importantly, the chain is set for several updates this year coupled with the fact that we’re now seeing BNB Chain liquidity layer solutions such as THENA play a more integral role. That said, let’s dive into some of the key reasons why the BNB Chain will likely continue to compete in DeFi’s big league in 2025;

Numbers Don’t Lie! According to Messari’s Q4, 2024 BNB Chain report, the ecosystem had one of best runs; the circulating market cap of the BNB native token closed the year at $101.1 billion, marking an increase of 113.7% compared to the figures at the beginning of 2024 while the total staked USD on BNB Chain also surged by a whooping 202.4% to hit $20.8 billion during the same period.

It is also intriguing to observe that the revenue (all fees collected by the network) also increased between Q3 and Q4 2024, from $34.9 million to $44.6 million - this represents a 28% positive change as per the latest quarterly metrics. Of course, Q1 of 2025 has been slower with Trump’s presidency effect fading away, but what’s worth noting is that the BNB native token is still in the top 5, with a total market cap of $92 billion as of writing. Depth in DEX Liquidity Another key factor that is panning out well for the BNB Chain is its expanding depth liquidity, an issue that most DeFi ecosystems have long struggled with. Messari’s report indicated that the DEX volume on BNB Chain was on an uptrend in H2 after a slow summer in 2024, ranking it fourth with a total volume of $117.57 billion. The only chains that eclipsed BNB were Solana ($305.56 billion), Ethereum ($204.27 billion) and Base ($128.69 billion). Amidst this growth were over 71 DEXs, but only two particularly stood out; Pancakeswap (a pioneer) and THENA, a spot DEX which is part of a larger liquidity layer ecosystem specifically designed for the BNB Chain. The latter is one of the interesting projects that are shaping the future of the BNB Chain ecosystem as mentioned in the introduction. But what exactly makes it different and why will it likely be a key factor in BNB’s Chain growth in future? THENA’s spot DEX stands out because of its concentrated liquidity solution; the DEX’s swap engine provides users with low -cost and efficient trades, thanks to the integration of the ORBS liquidity hub which facilitates the tapping of external liquidity to lower the price impact during execution. Beyond the spot DEX, THENA’s ecosystem features other liquidity focused offerings which include a perpetual DEX dubbed ALPHA, a social platform for competitive trading ‘ARENA’ and an upcoming launchpad, WARP. Promising Upgrades in 2025! There are also quite a number of upgrades scheduled for this year according to the BNB Chain Tech Roadmap 2025. First and foremost, the chain intends to build further on the network efficiency enhancements from last year; the Consecutive Block Production on BSC and Parallel Ethereum Virtual Machine on OpBNB. As per the update, the chain’s goal is to decrease the block time from 3 seconds to sub-seconds, ultimately reducing the transaction latency. Another major update that is anticipated is the allowance of gasless transactions for all types BEP-20 tokens, only stablecoin transactions are supported at the moment. The chain also plans to debut a smart wallet solution under EIP-7702, this will be instrumental in enhancing key management solutions for newbies and batch transactions to do away with the “approve-first-and-trade-second” approach. These two upgrades are just the tip of the iceberg, other areas of focus include implementing an AI-first approach, redefining developer tools and continued support of the burgeoning memecoin ecosystem. Conclusion The BNB Chain ecosystem weathered one of the biggest storms last year when former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) had to step down and serve a 4-month prison term in the U.S. With all this behind and the current CEO Richard Teng seemingly on top of things, the BNB Chain cannot be simply wished away; in fact, there is a high likelihood that it will continue to perform even better in 2025 based on the major factors highlighted in this article as well as other existing momentum builders such as adoption and ecosystem growth, developer incentives and the deflationary burn tokenomics mechanism.