The activation of the Fermi hard fork of the BNB Smart Chain on the mainnet is scheduled for January 14th, after about two months within the testnet phase.
According to the BNB community GitHub page, Fermi will lower the block interval from 750 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds to support “time-critical” applications that require block times of lower than a second.
The upgrade also introduces advanced tuning parameters to compensate for the communication delay between nodes attributable to the reduced block times.
For users who only need a portion of the ledger's total data, a brand new indexing mechanism is included as a substitute of downloading all the block history, a process that consumes copious computing resources.
An overview of the launch of the Fermi hard fork mainnet. Source: GitHub
The upgrade reflects blockchain networks' ongoing shift toward higher throughput and transaction speeds to make distributed systems on par with or higher than their centralized counterparts in the standard economic system.
BNB Chain's push to turn into a high throughput chain
The BNB Smart Chain is a Layer 1 blockchain network that was launched by cryptocurrency exchange Binance in 2020, but has since evolved right into a decentralized ecosystem managed by a community of validators and users.
According to dam explorer BSC Scan, the BNB chain is currently processing around 222 transactions per second (TPS).
However, in accordance with data from Chainspect, the protocol has a maximum theoretical TPS of 6,349.
Real-time TPS of the BNB chain. Source: Chainspect
Blockchain protocols lag traditional financial infrastructure in throughput, limiting using these networks for payments or high-frequency trading.
According to crypto exchange Phemex, Visa, certainly one of the leading payment providers and bank card corporations, processes around 1,700 TPS.
Because of this high throughput, payments to merchants are typically processed inside seconds via traditional payment channels.
According to crypto market evaluation platform Nansen, the variety of energetic addresses on the BNB chain has increased to 2,871,208, almost equal to the variety of energetic addresses on the high-throughput Layer 1 blockchain Solana.
The variety of energetic addresses for BNB Chain and Solana. Source: Nansen
Blockchain networks with longer block times and lower TPS also make decentralized finance (DeFi) applications unaffordable as they create delays that may result in slippage or poor transaction execution for the tip user.
Slippage occurs when a market order shouldn’t be executed on the spot price, typically attributable to technical communication problems or network congestion.
