- BNB Chain’s Lorentz hard fork goes live on April 29, cutting block times from 3 to 1.5 seconds to improve speed and user experience.
- BEP-520 powers the upgrade, alongside key changes like increased epoch size and halved gas limits—node upgrade to v1.5.10 is mandatory.
- BNB was listed on Kraken on April 22, now trading with four pairs including BNB/USD and BNB/EUR.
Alright, so here’s the deal: BNB Chain is getting ready to flip a pretty major switch. A hard fork upgrade (yep, another one) is right around the corner. According to a post from their official X account, the BSC Lorentz mainnet hard fork is slated for April 29 at 5:05 a.m. UTC. That’s less than a week away, if you’re counting.
Once this thing goes live, block times on BSC will be slashed in half—from 3 seconds down to just 1.5. That’s a huge drop. And it’s not just about speed for speed’s sake. This move is expected to tighten up confirmation times and make the whole user experience feel smoother… zippier, even. But it’s not all plug-and-play—this will ripple out to builders, validators, and infrastructure teams. Think: new hardware needs, tweaks to systems, and maybe a few unexpected “huh?” moments.
BEP-520 Is the Star of the Show
The main player here is something called BEP-520. It’s the only BEP in this upgrade (clean and focused), and its job is to bring that 1.5-second block interval to life. Faster blocks mean faster finality—transactions should lock in quicker.
What Else Is Changing?
But wait—there’s more. Alongside the block time tweak, other big changes are sneaking in:
- Epoch size is jumping from 200 to 500. (More time between validator rotations.)
- Gas limit is getting sliced in half—from 140M down to 70M gwei. But throughput? That’s staying steady.
- The Consecutive TurnLength is doubling (from 4 to 8), which affects validator order cycles.
Time to Update Your Nodes
If you’re running a mainnet node, here’s your heads-up: you need to upgrade to v1.5.10 before April 29. That’s not optional. It’s the version that supports the new Lorentz rules.
OpBNB: Already Ahead of the Curve
By the way, the OpBNB version of this hard fork already happened back on April 21. Over there, they went even more aggressive—block time was cut to 0.5 seconds. Fast is the name of the game, clearly.
Kraken Joins the Party
In other (equally spicy) news, BNB just got listed on Kraken. As of April 22, it’s tradable against EUR, USD, USDC, and USDT. So, yeah—BNB’s having a pretty eventful month.
