Interstellar is now live. The last few weeks, we broke down what was changing under the hood. Today, those improvements are live: greater EVM compatibility, more modern tooling for builders, and stronger foundations for scale. The protocol gets better when builders have less infrastructure to fight.

Over the last two days we've covered the new EVM opcodes and the cryptographic precompiles landing with VIP-255. Today, part three, the finale: the core protocol improvements sitting underneath both. Part 3: Interstellar Explained - Core Protocol Improvements EIP-2935 - historical block hashes from state: Block hashes for the most recent 8,191 blocks served through a contract, using Ethereum's exact calling convention. Human version: VeChainThor always had the receipts, filed in its own system. This puts them in the drawer Ethereum tools already know how to open. How it changes VeChain: VeChainThor already holds that history in state through the Extension built-in contract, so lookups resolve against Extension and return VeChainThor block IDs rather than Keccak hashes, making this an interface fix rather than new capability. Long term impact: proof systems and light-client designs written for Ethereum port across without a VeChainThor-specific rewrite. EIP-7825 - transaction gas limit cap: A hard ceiling of 16,777,216 gas on any single transaction. Human version: No single transaction gets to hog the whole block any more. Queue etiquette, enforced by the protocol. How it changes VeChain: Bounding the worst case holds 10-second block times steady when demand spikes, and it matters more here than on a single-clause chain, because a multi-clause transaction can otherwise stretch across most of a block on its own. Long term impact: predictable block times are what enterprise integrations get procured on, and a bounded worst case is what allows capacity to rise later without the tail risk rising with it. EIP-7934 - block size limit: A ceiling of 8 MiB on the encoded block. Human version: A limit on how fat a block is allowed to get. Keeps running a node in normal-computer territory rather than data-centre territory. How it changes VeChain: Gas accounting alone does not bound how physically large a block can grow, which leaves room to bloat blocks with cheap data and slow propagation across the network, so a byte-level cap closes that gap. Long term impact: node cost stays flat as usage climbs, and node cost determines how widely validation can be distributed. For VeChain, this is the layer that keeps the last two parts honest. Cheaper opcodes and native cryptography don't count for much if block times start slipping or running a node gets too expensive for anyone but a data centre. These three changes are what keep VeChainThor fast, predictable, and decentralised as more builders and more transactions land on it. For enterprise especially, this is the boring but essential part: predictable block times and stable node costs are the structural guarantees that get a network past procurement in the first place. That's the whole of VIP-255, eleven EIPs across three parts. The upgrade goes live at Block Height 25,902,540 on Wed 16 Sep 2026, 11:15:10 UTC (estimated)! Which of the three parts stood out to you most? Tell us below 👇