By Nina Rong, Executive Director, BNB Chain
Fermi is the next major performance upgrade for BNB Smart Chain, reducing block time from 0.75 seconds to 0.45 seconds while keeping network behavior stable under real production load.
The upgrade is delivered through the BSC v1.6.4 client, with v1.6.5 following as a synchronized maintenance release.
Faster blocks are only useful if they remain predictable at scale, and Fermi is designed to improve responsiveness for users and developers without compromising reliability.
Block time sounds like an abstract metric until you’ve built or used an application that depends on timing. When a network is slow, users feel it as hesitation: swaps take longer to confirm, game actions lag, and simple actions like staking or minting turn into wait states. Developers feel it as latency that forces design tradeoffs, like adding extra buffering, reducing interactivity, or moving logic off chain just to keep an app responsive.
But in a chain that runs at global scale, raw throughput is no longer the whole story. We’ll need to make sure the whole system behaves predictably while it runs faster reliably under real production conditions – across validators, nodes, infrastructure providers, wallets, and applications.
Hence, shorter blocks, delivered in a way the network can sustain in production, constitutes the next chapter of BSC’s evolution with the Fermi hard fork. It completes our short block interval roadmap so BSC can run faster without sacrificing the reliability developers, users, and operators depend on.
Fermi is the next major performance milestone for BNB Smart Chain, delivered through the BSC v1.6.4 client, with v1.6.5 following as a synchronized maintenance release.
At a technical level, Fermi is about tightening the full block lifecycle so the chain can produce blocks more frequently while remaining stable even as throughput increases. This combination matters as shorter blocks can introduce new stress points if the chain cannot propagate blocks efficiently across a global network, or if validators and infrastructure providers cannot keep up with the pace.
For users, this means faster confirmations and a smoother experience when interacting with applications on BSC. For developers, it means lower latency and more responsive on-chain interactions, which is especially important for applications where speed is core to product experience. For node operators, it means running a faster chain without trading away stability.
Fermi introduces a set of BEPs that work together to improve end-to-end performance. The most visible change is the block interval reduction from 0.75 seconds to 0.45 seconds, the shortest in BSC’s history.
In practice, this reduction would show up in the places users and builders actually notice. Across wallets, infrastructure, and applications, the chain simply feels faster. Transactions can be included sooner, confirmation times tighten, and DApps feel more responsive during peak activity – particularly for high-frequency DeFi use cases, advanced trading strategies, and workflows where users expect fast on-chain settlement.
Every BNB Chain hard fork reflects what we’ve learned from operating at scale. With Fermi, we’re refining everyday performance – ensuring that speed gains come with the stability our ecosystem expects.
This upgrade also sets the stage for what comes next in 2026. Our 2026 roadmap remains focused on making BNB Chain faster and more capable while keeping the network stable and predictable for our users, developers, validators, and infrastructure providers.
Speed is only meaningful when it translates into real usability. Fermi is a step toward a chain that feels faster in everyday interactions while preserving the stability that allows an ecosystem to build with confidence, even as on-chain finance and consumer applications keep growing. As this work is incremental by design, Fermi is one step in a broader roadmap while we keep aiming to ship upgrades that make BSC faster and more capable without compromising the reliability the ecosystem depends on.
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