- The Fermi hard fork will cut block times to 250ms, enabling faster DeFi and real-time apps.
- It will also introduce extended voting and partial indexing, leading to stability and lighter nodes.
- The experimental BAL showed ~18.6% execution gains in local tests.
BNB Smart Chain is preparing for a major protocol upgrade early next year.
The network’s upcoming Fermi hard fork, scheduled for mainnet activation in January 2026, signals a renewed push toward faster block times, higher throughput, and infrastructure designed for time-sensitive applications.
Notably, the upgrade follows months of testing and reflects broader efforts across the blockchain sector to close the performance gap with traditional financial systems.
BNB Smart Chain block times set for a major cut
According to a press release on GitHub, the Fermi hard fork is set to activate on the BNB Smart Chain mainnet on Jan. 14, after roughly two months of live testing on the Fermi testnet.
At the core of the upgrade is a sharp reduction in block times, which will fall to 250 milliseconds from the current 750 milliseconds.
This change places BNB Smart Chain firmly in the sub-second block time category.
It is designed to support applications that depend on rapid confirmation, including high-frequency trading tools, real-time gaming, and advanced decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols.
Shorter block intervals often come with trade-offs, especially around network communication and validator coordination.
To address this, the Fermi upgrade introduces extended voting parameters that help compensate for message propagation delays between nodes.
These adjustments aim to preserve consensus stability even as blocks are produced three times faster than before.
The result is a network that can process transactions more quickly without sacrificing correctness or security, a balance that has proven difficult for many layer-1 blockchains.
Currently, BNB Smart Chain ranks among the most actively used layer-1 networks, processing around 165 transactions per second, according to Chainspect.
This places behind L1 networks like Solana, which currently process up to 799 transactions per second.
With the Fermi hard fork, BNB Smart Chain aims for faster block production and reduced confirmation delays, especially during peak sessions, which would be important for DeFi applications.
The upgrade also introduces a new partial-ledger indexing mechanism. Instead of forcing users and node operators to download the full historical ledger, the new system allows participants to sync only the data they need.
This will significantly reduce storage and computing requirements, making it easier to run nodes and interact with the network.
Experimental gains point to future potential
Notably, the Fermi hard fork builds on recent experimental work aimed at improving execution performance, with one notable effort being the v1.6.4-feature-BAL7928 client release introduced late last year.
That experimental release implements a non-consensus Block-Access-List, or BAL, based on EIP-7928 and similar in design to BEP-592.
Rather than altering consensus rules, BAL data is shared through peer-to-peer block propagation messages, allowing for more efficient transaction execution when the data is available.
In local testing environments, the BAL implementation delivered an average performance improvement of roughly 18.6% in million gas per second.
Developers note, however, that real-world benefits depend on broad network adoption, as nodes only gain performance improvements when peers also support the feature.
As competition intensifies among layer-1 blockchains, these upgrades position the BNB Smart Chain network to better serve high-demand applications and growing user activity.
This will possibly support renewed interest in Binance Coin (BNB), thus spurring a price rebound from the three-month decline, where it has dropped to around $833.48 from its October 2025 peak of $1,369.99.
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