In a significant milestone for blockchain performance, the BNB Chain development team has confirmed that the most recent network upgrade has halved block times, resulting in new blocks being produced twice as fast as before. This improvement not only boosts the chain’s overall throughput but also enables faster finality for user transactions.
On June 30, BNB Chain completed the Maxwell hard fork, a major upgrade to BNB Smart Chain (BSC), which reduced block times by 50%, from 1.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds. The upgrade builds on the Lorentz hard fork, which slashed BSC block times from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds, laying the framework for faster DeFi, smoother UX and stronger validator performance.
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Aside from reducing block intervals to 0.75 seconds, Maxwell enhances validator communication across the network and accelerates block syncing between nodes, with benefits for all network participants, including users, developers, validators and node operators.
What changed?
The Maxwell upgrade enacted three key proposals — BEP-524, BEP-563 and BEP-564 — each designed to improve core aspects of the chain’s speed and reliability.
BEP-524 introduced a new block interval of 0.75 seconds, which will speed up transaction confirmations, improve dApp responsiveness and enable better DeFi and GameFi interactions.
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BEP-563 (Enhanced Validator Network) enhances peer-to-peer messaging between validators, resulting in faster block proposal communication, a lower risk of missed votes or sync delays and a more stable validator network under faster conditions.
BEP-564 (Smarter Block Fetching) introduces two new message types to the bsc/2 protocol: GetBlocksByRangeMsg requests several recent blocks in a single call; RangeBlocksMsg returns all requested blocks in one response, considerably improving network sync speeds.
