Bitcoin Cash Faster Blocks Upgrade Targets Lock-In for One-Minute Blocks

The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Faster Blocks upgrade targets lock-in for one-minute blocks on November 15, 2026, according to the CHIP-2025-03 specification. The proposal cuts the network's target block time from 10 minutes to 1 minute. It first activates on chipnet, the network's upgrade test network, with mainnet activation proposed for May 15, 2027.

What Bitcoin Cash Faster Blocks Changes

Faster Blocks has been in review since March 2025. Its specification carries the status Accepted and is owned by the developer bitcoincashautist. The upgrade shortens the interval between blocks and introduces a unit called the tick to measure chain time. Every 10-minute block counts as 600 ticks, and after activation every block counts as 60 ticks. The 21 million coin cap and the halving schedule stay on the same timeline by design.

Bitcoin Cash, a proof-of-work payment chain that launched in August 2017 as a hard fork of Bitcoin, has always used 10-minute blocks (what Bitcoin Cash is). Wallets and exchanges that credit deposits after a set number of confirmations would see those confirmations arrive about ten times faster. The proposal ships a confirmations_ticks field so software can track the new cadence, and existing nLockTime values keep their old 10-minute scale, so no timelock releases early.

Lock-In on November 15, Mainnet Target May 2027

The deployment plan activates Faster Blocks on chipnet at 12:00 UTC on November 15, 2026, and proposes mainnet activation at 12:00 UTC on May 15, 2027. Node teams have been testing the change on a temporary test network since October, with infrastructure moving to chipnet after the lock-in milestone, according to the project's pre-upgrade testing thread. The Knuth node team says it is on track for the milestone.

Faster Confirmations, Same Security Budget

The proposal's models put the orphan rate at 0.41% to 1.94% across tested conditions, against a 2% tolerable threshold. Finalization still fires at about 120 minutes, and the block parking penalty keeps its roughly 40-minute wall-clock lock-in, so the security budget scales with the faster cadence. The specification says 95% of single-confirmation transactions clear in under 3 minutes, compared with 25% taking more than 14 minutes today.

Bitcoin Cash traded near $210 on November 15, 2026, per the Bitcoin Cash price chart on Coinranking.