BNB Smart Chain has activated the Osaka/Mendel hard fork on mainnet at 02:30 UTC on April 28, 2026, as part of its push to make transactions confirm faster and more reliably. The upgrade introduces nine protocol changes, known as BEPs, that focus on execution efficiency, gas behavior, and “fast finality” rather than chasing even shorter block times.
Earlier forks like Fermi already cut block production to about 0.45 seconds, so Osaka/Mendel targets what happens once the chain is running that quickly. The goal is to keep confirmations stable under real-world usage, reduce the risk of short-chain reorganizations, and give users greater confidence that a confirmed transaction will not be rolled back.
Key Changes in the Osaka/Mendel Fork
One headline feature is BEP‑652, which adds a hard gas cap of 16,777,216 gas per transaction across the network. All nodes now reject transactions that exceed this limit, replacing the earlier soft‑cap model and making block construction more predictable for validators.
Developers also introduced an in‑memory voting pool that lets validators process consensus votes directly from system memory instead of slower disk operations. This change strengthens fast finality by speeding up the time it takes the network to agree that a block is irreversible, even during heavy load.
Requirements for Validators and Node Operators
Node operators had to upgrade to BSC v1.7.2 before the fork or risk falling out of sync with mainnet. The update was mostly a binary replacement, but operators also needed to check their configs and remove deprecated fields, such as “JournalFileEnabled.”
Validators who missed the deadline could see their nodes stop following the canonical chain, lose rewards, or even produce invalid blocks. BNB Chain’s team also urged operators to watch logs and performance closely after the fork to catch any issues early.
The hard fork should be nearly undetectable to frequent users. Confirmations should be more stable, with fewer minor reorganizations and more predictable fees because of the new gas cap, while transactions, swaps, and DeFi activities continue as usual.
Since upgrades occur at the protocol level, most dApps don’t require code changes. However, if stronger finality is observed after a predetermined number of blocks, developers of cross-chain bridges, liquid staking, and high-frequency apps may still modify their confirmation assumptions.
Osaka/Mendel follows earlier upgrades like Fermi and Maxwell, which focused mainly on speed and capacity.
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