Is the Post-Fermi Roadmap of BNB Chain a Foundation for 2026?

The Fermi hardfork has successfully launched on the BNB Chain, significantly enhancing its block production speed. Following this upgrade, the time required to create a block has decreased from 0.75 seconds to just 0.45 seconds, nearly doubling the speed.

Key Takeaways

The Fermi hardfork has improved BNB Chain's block production speed, reducing the time from 0.75 seconds to 0.45 seconds.
BNB Chain aims to build a high-performance trading chain by 2026, focusing on user experience and developer flexibility.
BNB Chain now ranks among the top five fastest chains, competing closely with Solana.
While BNB’s transaction fees have improved, they still lag behind Solana's significantly lower transaction costs.
Despite a strong performance by BNB in the last quarter of 2025, Solana has outperformed it in early 2026, resulting in better returns for SOL investors.

Fermi hardfork goes live - What it means for BNB Chain in 2026

This improvement means that transactions are now confirmed more swiftly, resulting in a smoother experience for applications and transfers, even during peak traffic times, without significant delays. However, this upgrade is only the beginning, serving as a foundation for even larger ambitions for BNB Chain in 2026.

Nina Rong, the Executive Director of Growth at BNB Chain, shared in an email to AMBCrypto, “Looking ahead to 2026, we’re creating a next-generation trading chain aimed at extreme performance – focusing on near-instant confirmations, substantial sustained throughput, and a hybrid model that combines on-chain and off-chain computation.”

Rong further emphasized that BNB Chain's future will prioritize improving user experience and providing greater flexibility to developers. “Our objective is to achieve a Web2-level user experience while maintaining decentralization, security, and freedom of choice for developers, including an adaptable migration path for builders to transition to new infrastructure at their own pace.”

Enhanced Competition in Smart Contract Chains

In recent times, Layer 1 smart contract-based networks have become increasingly competitive as they aim to address perceived flaws in Ethereum, the founding pioneer of decentralized finance (DeFi).

BNB vs. Solana

This recent upgrade positions BNB Chain among the top five quickest blockchain platforms, achieving block times of less than one second. Solana stands out as its primary competitor in this respect.

BNB

Source: Chainspect

Beyond speed, Solana is known for its low transaction fees, which played a significant role in the success of various memecoins on its platform. To maintain competitive pricing, BNB Chain reduced its transaction fee to $0.005 in late 2025. However, BNB Chain's transaction cost has recently increased slightly to $0.0918, which still presents a notable improvement. Nonetheless, it still lags behind Solana’s transaction cost of just $0.0038, making it approximately 95% cheaper to transact on Solana.

BNB chain

Source: Token Terminal

Price Performance: BNB vs. SOL

On the price charts, Solana has seen a positive turn against BNB at the beginning of 2026, particularly after BNB outperformed it by over 33% in Q4 2025. As of January 2026, Solana has appreciated by nearly 7% against BNB, as revealed by the SOL/BNB ratio that indicates their comparative performance.

In the last two weeks, Solana surged from $124 to $145, achieving a remarkable 17% gain. In comparison, BNB rose from $857 to $940 during the same timeframe, showing a 10% increase. Consequently, investors in Solana are witnessing slightly better returns than those holding BNB at this moment.

BNB chain

Source: SOL/BNB ratio, TradingView

Conclusion

As BNB Chain continues to evolve and adapt, its focus on speed and user experience could set the stage for its success in the competitive blockchain landscape by 2026. Investors and developers are closely watching these developments as they can impact their strategies in the ever-changing crypto market.