The hard fork completes the final phase of BNB Chain’s ‘short block interval’ roadmap and is intended as a performance and reliability upgrade rather than a cosmetic tweak.
With Fermi, BSC validators will produce blocks every 0.45 seconds, almost halving the time it takes to confirm transactions on-chain.
Nina Rong, executive director of growth at BNB Chain, told Cointelegraph that the goal is “faster without compromising reliability,” combining shorter blocks with strengthened fast finality rules so that confirmation guarantees remain predictable even under congestion.
The upgrade refines the network’s consensus rules so that validators remain synchronized despite the tighter block schedule. BNB Chain reports this documentationFermi 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 activation in January
Built for latency-sensitive use cases
BNB Chain focuses Fermi directly on latency-sensitive applications, including onchain trading, real-time decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and interactive decentralized gaming applications (DApps).
Rong said the upgrade is designed to “improve real-world performance, not just peak throughput,” targeting conditions where network activity peaks and confirmation times need to remain stable for users and merchants.
Most DApps and smart contracts do not require code changes, and the transition is expected to be largely seamless for end users. Still, Rong noted that teams that rely on precise block timing should recheck their assumptions, as blocks will now arrive significantly faster than before.
Lessons from the traffic jams of the past
Like other high-throughput chains, BNB Chain has faced challenges accumulation and a degraded user experience during speculative peaks and high-volume trading events.
Rong says these episodes shaped Fermi’s design. The upgrade tightens voting rules for fast finality and validator coordination, specifically to keep the chain responsive and confirmation times predictable under heavy load.
She emphasized that the changes aim to ensure that validators “stay synchronized to keep the network stable” even as 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 quickly detect and address issues as they arise.
Related: Ondo tokenizes over 100 US stocks and ETFs on BNB Chain
Performance of BNB Chain in 2025
BNB Chain was one of the busiest blockchains of 2025 in terms of transaction volume and user activity, and was second only to Solana in terms of total onchain transactions, with approximately 3.89 billion transactions recorded in 2025.
That growth was made possible by a combination of low costs, aggressive performance optimizations, and an active DeFi and memecoin ecosystem.
By increasing block times to 0.45 seconds with a target finality of “approximately one second,” Fermi puts BNB Chain in a different performance class than the Ethereum base layer, which offers stronger decentralization guarantees but significantly 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 technology roadmapthat focuses on high-performance infrastructure, predictable latency, and scaling the base layer for heavier, more complex workloads.
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