Is BNB Chain’s post-Fermi roadmap the ‘foundation’ for 2026?

The Binance [BNB] Chain has successfully activated the Fermi hardfork, resulting in a nearly doubled block production speed. Following the upgrade, the block creation time has decreased from 0.75 seconds to 0.45 seconds, making transactions faster and providing a snappier experience for users, even during peak times.

This enhancement serves as a foundation for future plans for BNB Chain in 2026. According to Nina Rong, Executive Director of Growth at BNB Chain, the goal is to create a next-generation trading chain with extreme performance, targeting near-instant confirmations, high throughput, and a hybrid on-chain and off-chain compute model.

Rong emphasized that the focus moving forward will be on improving user experience and providing more flexibility for developers. The aim is to deliver a Web2-level user experience while maintaining decentralization, security, and developer choice.

BNB Chain now ranks among the top five fastest chains with sub-second block times, putting it in competition with Solana [SOL]. Solana is currently the main contender in terms of speed and transaction costs, offering some of the lowest fees in the market.

Source: Chainspect

In a bid to match the competition, BNB Chain reduced its transaction cost to $0.005 in late 2025. Despite a slight increase to $0.0918, BNB Chain has made significant progress in narrowing the fee gap with Solana, whose transaction costs are currently much lower.

Source: Token Terminal

BNB vs. SOL

On the price charts, SOL has been outperforming BNB in early 2026, with SOL/BNB ratio indicating a 7% gain for SOL against BNB. While both tokens have seen increases in value, SOL has shown slightly stronger returns for investors.

Source: SOL/BNB ratio, TradingView

Final Thoughts

• BNB Chain activated the Fermi hardfork, doubling block creation speed.
• Nina Rong, Binance Executive, highlighted the upgrade as a step towards scaling plans for 2026.