The opBNB network has completed a mainnet hard fork that was launched on the testnet early Tuesday morning. The Fourier mainnet hard fork was then migrated to mainnet around 03:00 UTC on Wednesday, and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed its completion an hour later.
According to opBNB Network Upgrade: memo GitHub has halved blocking times from 500ms to 250ms with the Fourier hard fork, and has implemented several changes to improve stability, finality handling, and node performance.
opBNB is a layer 2 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible network built using an OP stack that extends applications on top of the BNB chain. The blockchain has a block size of 100 million gas and features consistently low transaction fees with an emphasis on high throughput.
Fourier upgrade reduces block spacing and fixes P2P node derivation
As praised by Zhao in today's X post, the main change delivered through the Fourier hard fork was the implementation via pull request #305, which cut the block interval in half. Reducing block times to 250 milliseconds means opBNB improves transaction processing speed and responsiveness for applications deployed on the network.
opBNB just completed a mainnet hard fork about an hour ago. Block time reduced from 500ms to 250ms.
Keep building, #BNB https://t.co/4JdMgQcE4M
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) January 7, 2026
Shorter block intervals also reduce confirmation time, making interactions feel closer to real-time for users and developers. Still, node operators were instructed to upgrade op-geth to version 0.5.9 to maintain blockchain compatibility with the new protocol rules.
Another change has come Pull request #319This fixes the way the network handles layer 1 references used by the sequencer and derivation logic. opBNB now uses the final layer 1 block as a reference point instead of relying on the latest layer 1 head.
This adjustment addresses expected changes in the BNB Smart Chain, where block times are set to drop to 450ms. Validators can generate up to 16 consecutive blocks under new conditions. However, large-scale reorganizations require higher confirmation thresholds on both validators and sequencers, which can delay deposit transactions by several minutes.
According to BNB developer Joey Chang, the Fourier hard fork also bundles several fixes that impact node reliability by adding support for compiling opBNB with Golang version 1.24.x and compatibility with Windows operating systems.
Pull request #324 fixed an error in block number calculation that could occur during long shutdowns, and long outages now complete correctly on restart. If a node is down for a long period of time, block calculations may be incorrect when restarted.
Resolved an issue that affected nodes running op-geth in fastnode mode due to a hard fork, preventing them from retaining complete state data. When a compute node attempts to derive a new block using the engine API, empty block roots can occur due to missing state information.
This failure caused the op-node's main loop to exit and stop block synchronization, but the fix now is that in fastnode mode, the op-node will wait for insecure blocks from the peer-to-peer network without requesting block derivation from the op-geth.
Further fixes include resolving the map concurrency issue in reference metrics via pull request #326 and adding Fourier hardfork timestamps to mainnet parameters via pull request #328.
BNB Chain records 40% increase in TVL in 2025, token maintains $900 level
The opBNB upgrade comes against the backdrop of an active year for the Binance Chain ecosystem, with end-2025 statistics showing TVL increasing by 40.5% year-on-year and daily trading volume reaching 10.78 million. report.
There are over 700 million unique addresses on the BNB Chain, with an average of over 4 million daily active users on both the BNB Smart Chain and opBNB. BNB, the blockchain’s native token, recently broke through the $910 resistance zone and rose nearly 2% to trade above $920 as the rest of the cryptocurrency market continues its recovery.
As of this report, BNB is up 5% over the past seven days and is 33% off its all-time high of $1,370 reached last October. BNB reached an intraday high of $921.47, but a price correction pushed the price back below the next technical resistance at $918.
This price move comes ahead of the Fermi hard fork scheduled for January 14th, which is expected to increase the processing capacity of the BNB chain to 20,000 transactions per second.
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