The post BNB Smart Chain’s Fermi hard fork scheduled to launch in January 2026 appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

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,…

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Filed under: News - @ December 27, 2025 7:06 am