BNB Chain Fermi Hard Fork to Cut Block Times on Jan. 14
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BNB Smart Chain to activate the Fermi hard fork on Jan. 14, following roughly two months of testing on the testnet.
The mainnet rollout follows the Fermi testnet activation in November and will further reduce block times on the layer-1 blockchain. According to the BNB community’s GitHub page, Fermi shortens the block interval to 250 milliseconds from 750 milliseconds to support “time-sensitive” applications requiring sub-second finality.
The upgrade expands voting parameters to compensate for potential communication delays between nodes introduced by faster block production. It also adds a new indexing option for users who need only a subset of ledger data, avoiding the need to download the complete block history and lowering computing overhead.
An overview of the Fermi hard fork mainnet rollout. Source: GitHub
The change aligns with broader efforts across blockchain networks to increase throughput and transaction speed relative to traditional financial infrastructure.
BNB Chain’s drive to increase throughput
BNB Smart Chain, launched in 2020 by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has since evolved into a decentralized ecosystem governed by a community of validators and users.
BNB Chain currently processes about 222 transactions per second (TPS), according to block explorer BSC Scan. Its maximum theoretical throughput is 6,349 TPS, per data from Chainspect.
BNB chain real-time TPS. Source: Chainspect
Blockchain systems generally trail traditional payment networks on throughput, constraining their suitability for payments or high-frequency trading. Visa processes about 1,700 TPS, according to crypto exchange Phemex, enabling merchant payments to settle within seconds on legacy rails.
BNB Chain’s active address count has risen to 2,871,208, approaching the active address levels on high-throughput layer-1 Solana, according to market analytics platform Nansen.
Active address counts for BNB Chain and Solana. Source: Nansen
Longer block times and lower TPS can hinder decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases by introducing latency, which may lead to slippage or unfavorable execution for end users. Slippage occurs when a market order is filled at a price different from the spot rate, often due to communication delays or network congestion.
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