BNB stays under $900 while fewer people use the chain, even though the chain keeps adding new code. The gap between the low price and the low usage forces observers to ask whether anyone truly adopts the chain, whether products face danger plus whether big buyers still care.
Day-to-day work on the network shrinks as transactions per day slipped to 15.1 million from the top of 31.3 million seen on 8 October 2025; the network now runs at only 19% of its capacity, down from 51%. Trade on decentralized exchanges lost 5.02 billion dollars, but also projects tied to the chain bled about 13.9 billion dollars, equal to 6.3% of their total value, signaling pressure on liquidity and confidence.
Developer presence fell even faster as on chain work from builders dropped roughly 85% in June 2025, and the count of new smart contracts deployed each day fell 34.77% to 54,369. Futures open interest holds steady—yet the sharp fall in product building points to a deep flaw in the effort to spread the ecosystem as well as to keep DeFi services alive.
A side issue fuels distortion as more than 100,000 on chain traders now chase memecoins on the chain. This crowd drags liquidity away from rivals like Solana and triggers price jumps that do not mirror any real gain in health.
BNB under $900: activity drops and warning lights flash
The core code still receives money and changes. The Lorentz besides Maxwell hard forks cut block time from three seconds to 0.75 seconds and lift raw throughput to 6,000 simple transfers per second while fees stay cheap. TPS counts how many actions the network handles in one second, and the emphasis on throughput highlights the push for scale.
The next steps, the Haber or Tycho hard forks, will add support for the “Cancun” upgrade of another major chain and will widen client choice—adding Rust clients like Reth. The plan also adds security tools aimed at institutions including account abstraction and key rotation. All functions that still run on the BNB Beacon Chain will move to the BNB Smart Chain, and the Beacon Chain will shut down in December 2024.
Rules and the wider market also shape outcomes. An institutional manager filed for a BNB ETF in May 2025, an act that may draw sharper regulatory attention—at the same time, moves in interest rates plus flows into government debt push or pull on digital assets.
BNB must solve two problems at once: bring back natural activity and turn code upgrades into real use plus institutional trust. The market will judge success when the Haber next to Tycho upgrades go live in 2025–2026; only then will we see whether the tech refresh ends the slide in users but also liquidity.
