BNB Chain’s Fermi Upgrade Brings 0.45-Second Blocks and Faster Finality

The BNB Chain Fermi upgrade, activated on Wednesday, significantly enhances performance by cutting BNB Smart Chain (BSC) block times from 0.75 seconds to 0.45 seconds, targeting transaction finality of "around one second." This hard fork completes the network's "short block interval" roadmap, focusing on performance and reliability. According to Nina Rong, executive director at BNB Chain, the goal is to achieve faster speeds without compromising reliability by strengthening fast-finality rules to ensure predictable confirmations even during congestion. The upgrade refines consensus rules and introduces stricter propagation and voting parameters to maintain validator synchronization under the tighter schedule. Fermi is specifically aimed at latency-sensitive use cases like onchain trading, real-time DeFi, and interactive gaming DApps. While most DApps will not require code changes, teams relying on precise block timing must adjust. The design was informed by past congestion issues, tightening rules to keep the chain responsive under heavy load. This positions BNB Chain as one of the fastest major Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains, offering a speed advantage over Ethereum's base layer while remaining EVM-compatible, unlike rivals like Solana.

(Source：Cointelegraph)