BNB Smart Chain clients

BNB Smart Chain runs a Proof-of-Staked-Authority consensus that upstream go-ethereum does not implement, so every client here is a fork carrying chain-specific consensus code. You cannot run stock Geth, stock Erigon or stock Reth against this chain; you run somebody’s fork of one of them.

The supported set was narrowed deliberately, and recently.

bnb-chain/bsc — the Geth fork

The client the chain has run on since the beginning, and still what most operators use. Everything is tested against it, and the tooling assumes it.

reth-bsc — the Reth fork

The newer one, and the reason this chain now has a diversity story at all. Two implementations that share no consensus code is the whole point — what a supermajority bug costs applies here as much as anywhere.

Erigon — gone

Support ended 31 December 2025. If you are still running it, the migration is overdue rather than upcoming.

Both forks answer to their parents’ names. A BNB Smart Chain node asked what it is replies with something that looks exactly like an Ethereum client:

curl -s https://bsc-dataseed.bnbchain.org \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"web3_clientVersion","params":[]}'

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"Geth/v1.7.7-6c154fb3-20260723/linux-amd64/go1.26.5"}

This is the one place where the census on this site makes an inference rather than reporting what it was told: a Geth banner measured on BNB Smart Chain is resolved to the fork, because the alternative is impossible rather than merely unlikely. Reporting it as Geth would fold this chain’s estate into Ethereum’s client mix.

• Check the chain before the banner. The same string means two different pieces of software depending on which network answered it.
• Do not compare version numbers across forks. A fork’s series is unrelated to its parent’s, and to the other fork’s.
• reth-bsc names itself. It is the one client here whose banner is unambiguous, which is a small mercy.

Every measured endpoint is asked this on every cycle. The answers below are a small sample of the population that actually serves application traffic on this chain — not nodes on the peer-to-peer network, and not block-producing validators.

If you are choosing between endpoints rather than running one, the BNB Smart Chain rankings measure what these actually do, and the method matrix covers which of them answer what.