BNB Launches The Maxwell Hardfork This Monday

• The Maxwell upgrade is hitting the BNB mainnet, which reduces block intervals by 0.75 seconds from the previous 1.5 seconds.
• The event brings a range of features that enhance the BNB Chain’s stability and speed, which could pave the way to a boost in its adoption and more innovations within its ecosystem.

The BNB token continued its consolidation heading on Monday. However, cryptocurrency community members have considered the event a possible calm before the storm as its ecosystem geared up for its most crucial upgrade this year or even this cycle.

Today, BNB Chain is launching the Maxwell hardfork on the mainnet, bringing along a slew of performance updates for users. These include a significant reduction in block intervals to under a second.

0.75-Second Block Interval in BNB

The Maxwell hardfork is also known as the BEP-563 upgrade. This is a follow-up to the Lorentz hardfork from last April.

ADVERTISEMENTThe previous update brought about a reduction in block times from 3 to 1.5 seconds. This time, it further reduces the numbers to 0.75 seconds.

Maxwell’s consensus parameters have been adjusted to increase epoch length from 500 to 1,000. Epoch length is the defined time or a calendar defining when specific events occur within the chain. It harmonizes blocks and organizes network activities, such as validator selection, reward distribution, and protocol updates. Additionally, it overhauls BNB’s consecutive block production from 8 to 16 blocks and speeds up finality to ~1.875 seconds.

Maxwell’s testnet only began on May 26, giving the BNB team around a month for its mainnet rollout.

ADVERTISEMENT## Advantages of the Maxwell Upgrade

The feature is expected to boost BNB’s adoption and growth considerably. It will also drive transaction fees down from the prevailing $0.04 benchmark.

Moreover, the faster peer-to-peer communication within the chain enables quicker block proposal communication. This way, the risk of missed votes or sync delays are mitigated. It likewise prevents network congestion.

Maxwell makes all these possible by implementing two new message types under the bsc/2 protocol. The GetBlockzByRangeMsg lets users request multiple recent blocks in a lone call. Meanwhile, the RangeBlocksMsg returns and consolidates all requested blocks in a single response.

Users can primarily benefit from the update through near-instant transactions, including swaps and mints. Their interactions with decentralized applications (dApp) virtually become more seamless.

On the other hand, Maxwell provides a new design space for dApp developers. This gives them flexibility in building more responsive and sophisticated applications. Most importantly, they can leverage the greater stability the improved network synchronization brings.

Reminders

The BNB team advises developers to update time-based logic to prevent race conditions or syncing issues. Furthermore, it informed validators and node operators about experiencing slightly higher compute demand due to the performance enhancements.

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