Can BNB Rally Post-Maxwell? Chain’s Latest Upgrade Cuts Block Time for Better Performance

• The Maxwell Hardfork is officially coming off today, with Binance Chain expected to record a significant reduction in block times from 1.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds. 
• The price of BNB is also expected to record an explosive surge from the current level, as analysts predict a level above $1000. 

Binance (BNB) Chain is embarking on one of the most crucial hard forks in its history to enhance the responsiveness of the network while improving the validator performance and transaction speed.

Dubbed Maxwell, the testnet hardfork occurred on May 26, 2025, with the mainnet hardfork scheduled for today, June 30, 2025.

What to Expect

The Maxwell Hardfork is expected to reduce block times to 0.75 seconds from 1.5 seconds. According to reports, this would significantly enhance Decentralized Finance (DeFi) operations, improve user experience, and make transactions cheaper.

As noted in our previous discussion, the Lorentz Hardfork, which occurred earlier, reduced the block time from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds. This made the network more attractive, increasing its daily Decentralized Exchange (DEX) volume to rank first on Dune. Additionally, its average transaction fee was reduced to just $0.04. Above all, this improved the network’s stability by reducing the Reorg frequency from “5/day to 2/day”.

As indicated in our earlier discussion, BNB Chain completed another upgrade dubbed Pascal in March to enhance the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), facilitate gasless transactions, and improve user experience.

More About the BNB Chain’s Maxwell Hardfork

The much-anticipated Maxwell Hardfork is reported to be powered by three main proposals, namely BEP-524, BEP-563, and BEP-564.

BEP-524 would introduce the 0.75 block interval to increase transaction confirmation time, improve DeFi and Game Finance (GameFi) interaction, etc. The BEP-563 would also improve the “peer-to-peer messaging between validators”. Per our research, this would facilitate faster block proposal communication, reduce the risk of missed votes, and stabilize the validator network. This time, under a faster condition.

With the last proposal, the BNB report highlights that this would introduce two “new message types in the bsc/2 protocol.” According to the post, the first is the GetBlocksByRangeMsg and the second is the RangeBlocksMsg. While the former requests multiple recent blocks in a single call, the latter returns all requested blocks in one response.

The post detailing this initiative also highlighted that the upgrade introduced by the Maxwell Hardfork would benefit all stakeholders. Firstly, users are said to “enjoy” near-instant transactions. Developers are also expected to witness a new design space for Decentralized Applications (DApps). For validators and node operators, there would be a stable operation under higher payload.

Basically, these initiatives align with the disclosure made by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) in February. As discussed earlier, CZ mentioned smart wallet, sub-second finality, and several others as some of the objectives to achieve this year.

Reacting to the Maxwell Hardfork, BNB has recorded a 12% surge in its daily trading volume. According to CoinMarketCap data, the price of BNB is currently up by 0.5% in the last 24 hours, 4.6% in the last seven days, 0.08% in the last 30 days, and 6.2% in the last 90 days.

As mentioned in our recent blog post, Standard Chartered analysts believe that the price of BNB, which is currently around $653, could more than double. Similarly, analyst Mando CT has predicted that BNB could hit $1,500 in the near term, as explained in our last analysis.