BNB Smart Chain’s Maxwell upgrade appears to have gone live, with average block times falling to 0.8 seconds, down from 1.5 on Monday.
The Maxwell hard fork was set to cut block times in half, among other upgrades.
BNB Chain said on Thursday that the Maxwell upgrade will make transactions faster for users, create more responsive decentralized applications (DApps) for developers, lower the latency for decentralized finance, boost scalability, validator sync and improve overall network efficiency.
“This isn’t just another upgrade—it’s a technical leap forward for faster blocks, better validator coordination, and smoother network performance,” the BNB Chain team said.
The Maxwell hard fork time was scheduled to go live on June 30 at 2:30 am UTC, according to a GitHub proposal, following the testnet launch on May 26.
Hard fork hopes to make messaging faster, more efficient
The Maxwell hard fork had three main proposals, BEP-524, BEP-563, and BEP-564, designed to “improve core aspects of the chain’s speed and reliability,” according to BNB Chain.
Proposal BEP-563 was designed to improve peer-to-peer messaging between validators, allow faster block proposal communication, create a more stable validator network and reduce the risk of missed votes or sync delays.
“This reduces the risk of missed votes or delayed proposals — key for hitting that 0.75s target,” the BNB Chain team said.
BEP-564 is supposed to introduce two new message types to the protocol: GetBlocksByRangeMsg, which can request multiple recent blocks in a single call, and RangeBlocksMsg, which will return all requested blocks in one response.
The BNB Chain team said this “significantly improves sync speeds across the network.”
BEP-524 reduces the block time, following the Lorentz upgrade in April, which shaved the time from three seconds down to 1.5 seconds.
Developers and validators should prepare
The BNB Chain team said ahead of the upgrade that developers need to test their DApps under tighter block timing, refactor anything relying on 1.5-second intervals, and review time-based logic.
“If something breaks, it’s probably your code — not the chain,” the team added.
Validators must ensure their systems are benchmarked for 0.75 seconds and expect higher message throughput and faster consensus cycles.
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BNB price trades up ahead of upgrade
BNB Chain’s native token, BNB (BNB), spiked in the lead-up to the Maxwell upgrade. In the last seven days, BNB has spiked by 6.5% and drifted between a low of $617 and a high of $655.
It’s up 1.2% in the last 24 hours to trade at $655.70 and has been drifting between $647 and $656, CoinGecko data shows. However, the token is still 17% away from the all-time high of $788, which it hit on Dec. 4.
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