BNB Chain’s Fermi upgrade, which goes live Wednesday, will cut BNB Smart Chain (BSC) block times from 0.75 seconds to 0.45 seconds and push transaction finality to “around one second,” positioning the network as one of the fastest major Ethereum Virtual Machine chains.
The hard fork completes the final phase of BNB Chain’s “short block interval” roadmap and is framed as a performance and reliability upgrade rather than a cosmetic tweak.
With Fermi, BSC validators will produce blocks every 0.45 seconds, nearly halving the time it takes for transactions to be confirmed onchain.
Nina Rong, executive director at BNB Chain, told Cointelegraph that the goal is “faster without compromising reliability,” pairing shorter blocks with strengthened fast-finality rules so confirmation guarantees remain predictable even under congestion.
The upgrade refines the network’s consensus rules so validators stay in sync despite the tighter block schedule. According to BNB Chain’s documentation, Fermi also introduces stricter propagation and voting parameters intended to reduce finality delays when the network is busy.
Related: BNB Chain Fermi hard fork scheduled for January activation
Built for latency-sensitive use cases
BNB Chain is pitching Fermi squarely at latency-sensitive applications such as onchain trading, real-time decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and interactive gaming decentralized applications (DApps).
Rong said the upgrade is designed to improve “real-world performance, not just peak throughput,” targeting conditions where network activity spikes and confirmation times need to remain stable for users and traders.
Most DApps and smart contracts will not need code changes, and the transition is expected to be largely seamless for end users. However, Rong noted that teams relying on precise block timing should re-check their assumptions, as blocks will now arrive significantly faster than before.
Lessons from past congestion
Like other high-throughput chains, BNB Chain has faced congestion and degraded user experience during speculative surges and high-volume trading events.
Rong says those episodes informed Fermi’s design. The upgrade tightens fast-finality voting rules and validator coordination specifically to keep the chain responsive and confirmation times predictable under heavy load.
She emphasized that the changes aim to ensure validators “stay in sync to keep the network stable,” even when block production accelerates. The network has also lined up post-fork monitoring and a follow-up release to handle cleanup and stabilization, giving validators tools to detect and address issues quickly if they arise.
Related: Ondo tokenizes over 100 US stocks and ETFs on BNB Chain
BNB Chain’s 2025 performance
BNB Chain was one of the busiest blockchains of 2025 by transaction volume and user activity, ranking second only to Solana by total onchain transactions, with roughly 3.89 billion transactions recorded in 2025.
That growth was powered by a combination of low fees, aggressive performance optimizations, and an active DeFi and memecoin ecosystem.
By pushing block times to 0.45 seconds with a targeted finality of “around one second,” Fermi places BNB Chain in a different performance bracket from the Ethereum base layer, which offers stronger decentralization guarantees but substantially slower throughput and confirmation speed, producing a block around every 12 seconds.
At the same time, BNB Chain continues to offer an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible environment that differs from non-EVM, ultra-high-throughput rivals like Solana, appealing to developers who want speed without leaving the EVM ecosystem.
Fermi is also part of BNB Chain’s 2026 tech roadmap, which focuses on high-performance infrastructure, predictable latency, and scaling the base layer for heavier, more complex workloads.
