Major BNB Chain Upgrade Imminent: Countdown Begins

BNB Chain is approaching a crucial milestone as the network prepares to undergo a hard fork upgrade. According to a recent post by the official BNBchain X account, the BSC Lorentz mainnet hard fork is set for April 29 at 5:05 a.m. UTC, which is only six days away.

Following the hard fork, BSC will reduce block time to 1.5 seconds, lowering latency, speeding up confirmations and improving UX across the board. This has implications for builders, validators and infrastructure. Tooling and systems may require changes, and nodes should reconsider hardware options to preserve performance.

Lorentz includes one single BEP, the BEP-520, which allows for a 1.5-second block interval during phase one. BEP-520 decreases block time from 3 to 1.5 seconds post-Lorentz hard fork to accelerate transaction finality.

What to expect?

Aside from the 1.5-second block interval update, several other key parameters will be updated, including the Epoch, which will be increased from 200 to 500. BNB Chain validators will likewise expect a drop in the gas limit, which will be reduced from 140 million to 70 million gwei, although the overall throughput will remain the same. The “Consecutive TurnLength” will be increased from four to eight, among other adjustments.

Mainnet node v1.5.10 is required for the BSC Mainnet Lorentz hard fork, which will be enabled April 29. All BSC mainnet nodes are expected to be upgraded to this node version before the hard fork.

The OpBNB Lorentz mainnet hard fork was completed April 21, reducing block time to 0.5 seconds.

In recent news, the BNB cryptocurrency has secured a listing on a major cryptocurrency exchange. BNB went live on the Kraken exchange April 22, with four trading pairs currently available: BNB/EUR, BNB/USD, BNB/USDC and BNB/USDT.