BSC v1.8.1 brings compliant-asset tokens, a payment lane and millisecond timestamps to testnet

Victoria Shinder17 October 2026, 08:552 min read

BNB Chain published bsc v1.8.1 on 16 October 2026, a client release marked "Mandatory Update Required: Yes" and aimed at BSC Chapel testnet node operators, MEV builders and sentry operators. It bundles three new BNB Chain Evolution Proposals (BEPs) plus enhancements to an existing one. Because it targets the testnet and carries a hard fork named Jenner, it is a staging step rather than a mainnet change.

The three new standards.

• BEP-702: Compliant Asset Standard. Adds CAS20, a token type aimed at stablecoins and tokenized assets and built as stateful precompiles rather than ordinary contract code. The notes describe its compliance tooling as shared allow- and block-lists, rules on who may transfer, a pause switch, and distinct roles for issuing, destroying and seizing balances; a new token only goes live once a governance-appointed administrator activates it.
• BEP-703: Payment Lane. Sets aside 5% of each block's gas by default so that BNB transfers and calls to an approved set of payment contracts still get through when a block is otherwise full. Both the share and the list of eligible contracts can be adjusted by governance.
• BEP-706: Millisecond Timestamp. Lets a contract read the block time to the millisecond by calling precompile 0x70, for uses that need finer than one-second resolution; the ordinary block.timestamp value is left in seconds.

Operational changes to check. BEP-675 gains enhancements with no hard fork required: faster BidBlock encoding and decoding over gRPC (RLP binary payloads instead of JSON/hex), plus validation and builder-revocation improvements such as rejecting BidBlocks with a zero state root and persisting revocations across restarts. The release notes flag two things operators must verify when upgrading from v1.8.0: the MEV gRPC service is enabled by default when MEV and BidBlock submission are on, using the HTTP bind address and defaulting to port 8552 (configurable via [Eth.Miner.Mev] GRPCPort or disabled with --mev.grpc.disable); and a BEP-706 RPC change requires that, in eth_call, eth_estimateGas, debug_traceCall and eth_simulateV1, a supplied blockOverrides.prevRandao encode a millisecond remainder (0–999) as a 32-byte hex value — a check that applies immediately after upgrading, before the Jenner fork activates.

This is a testnet release; mainnet activation of these BEPs would follow separately, and the specifications (BEP-702, 703, 706, 675) in the bnb-chain/BEPs repository are the authoritative detail behind the summaries above.

Source: BNB Chain, "Release v1.8.1" (GitHub) — https://github.com/bnb-chain/bsc/releases/tag/v1.8.1