BNB Chain Optimizes for Speed, While Ethereum’s Fusaka Faces Developer Rift

The BNB Chain has officially completed the Lorentz mainnet hard fork, marking a significant technical leap forward for both BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and OpBNB.

With the upgrade, the network reduces BSC block times to 1.5 seconds, while OpBNB now boasts 0.5-second blocks. This makes it one of the fastest Layer-2 (L2) networks.

BNB Chain Completes Lorentz Hard Fork

The Lorentz upgrade is expected to significantly improve transaction confirmation speed, enable more responsive decentralized applications (dApps), and enhance the overall user experience.

“Welcome everyone to experience a faster and smoother BNB Chain,” the network stated.

The Lorentz upgrade builds on momentum from the Pascal hard fork, which laid the groundwork for this new era of performance improvements.

These upgrades aim to position BNB Chain as a top-tier ecosystem for developers and users seeking high throughput and low latency.

“Lorentz at 1.5s blocks? Solana already does 0.4s. But Maxwell is at 0.75s… BNB’s roadmap is evolution on crack,” one user quipped.

Despite this news, BNB’s price is up by a modest 0.29% in the last 24 hours. As of this writing, it was trading for $608.22.

BNB Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto

While BNB Chain enjoys smooth progress, Ethereum’s upcoming Fusaka hard fork is mired in internal controversy. Specifically, the now-scrapped EVM Object Format (EOF) upgrade has become contentious.

Originally slated to be part of Fusaka, EOF aimed to modernize Ethereum’s virtual machine (EVM) architecture. This could make future upgrades easier and improve developer tooling.

However, in a post on Monday, April 28, Ethereum Foundation executive Tomasz Kajetan Stańczak clarified that EOF would not be part of the upcoming May 7 Pectra upgrade. Further, its inclusion in Fusaka is under debate.

“The Pectra upgrade does not include EOF, nor intended to include EOF. Everything on Pectra is going as planned for the May 7th release,” Stańczak articulated.

Fate of Ethereum’s EOF on the Balance

In a follow-up post, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko confirmed EOF’s removal from Fusaka, citing concerns over complexity and potential delays.

“EOF was removed from the Fusaka network upgrade today,” Beiko stated.

The decision followed contentious developer calls. Strong disagreements emerged over whether the EOF was technically necessary or merely a symbolic improvement.

“EOF is probably dead due to a lack of rough consensus. This is a massive milestone… symbolic of Ethereum evolving toward maximal consideration of user impact,” said Storm, a data researcher at Paradigm.

Some developers voiced concerns that EOF added too much complexity and risked future maintainability. Others argued that dropping EOF represents a shift toward prioritizing user-centric governance over rigid adherence to prior technical roadmaps.

Supporters of EOF believe it would have made Ethereum’s core system cleaner and more modular. Such an outcome would align with the Ethereum Foundation’s broader vision of the platform as the “world computer of humanity” and an “infinite garden” that supports sustainable, decentralized growth.

Still, with Fusaka now targeted for Q3 or Q4 2025, likely in September or October, the Ethereum community will continue debating what constitutes necessary innovation versus over-engineering.

Ethereum (ETH) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto

In the short term, the contrast between BNB Chain’s aggressive technical advancements and Ethereum’s philosophical debates reflects two approaches to blockchain evolution. While one focuses on speed and optimization, the other targets resilience and social consensus.