BCH makes a block about every ten minutes. A proposal called Faster Blocks (CHIP-2025-03) would make that one minute, starting with the May 2027 upgrade. Here is what changes, what does not, and where it stands. WHERE TEN MINUTES CAME FROM Satoshi picked ten minutes to balance three things: how quickly a transaction confirms, how often two miners find a block at the same moment and waste work, and how easily a full node follows the chain. Longer blocks meant fewer orphans and less propagation pressure. That tradeoff was made in 2009 for a internet that was much slower. bitcoin-cash:native has also added significant smart contract, cross-chain and defi capabilities since. WHAT THE FASTER BLOCKS ACTUALLY DOES Blocks arrive ten times as often. Everything tied to a block divides by ten: the block reward, the difficulty adjustment, the block size limit. Per hour, the supply schedule and the capacity are identical. What changes is the resolution of time. Confirmations: today about a quarter of first confirmations take longer than 14 minutes. With one-minute blocks, the CHIP puts 95% of first confirmations under three minutes. Long waits get steadier. Sixty confirmations, a common exchange requirement, currently means six ten-minute blocks with a standard deviation near 24 minutes. Sixty one-minute blocks has a standard deviation near 8 minutes. The CHIP's own figures: a 60-minute settlement completes in under 73 minutes 95% of the time, where today there is a 20% chance of waiting more than 79 minutes. Both numbers check out against the Erlang distribution. Contract clocks: the median time past window narrows from roughly 110 minutes to roughly 11. A contract asking whether an hour has passed gets an answer with far less slop in it. BITCOIN CASH ALREADY HAS INSTANT TRANSACTIONS, IT WILL JUST GET BETTER 0-conf already works on bitcoin-cash:native it is used for thousands of merchant and day to day transactions everyday, without RBF, BCH instant transactions are a everyday reality. Payments arrive in seconds on BCH already. What changes is the UX for confirmations, which matters when both the business and the user want to see faster confirmation bio-feedback. DeFi. Every block is a state tick. A DEX, a lending pool, a token launch all reprice and reconcile per block. Ten times more ticks means less time for a price to move between quote and fill, and fewer collisions when two transactions want the same state. Miners. The same revenue per hour, split into ten times as many ten-times-smaller pieces. That reduces payout variance, which matters most to small miners. HOW IT COMPARES IF LOCKED IN One minute would change will put BCH at the forefront of most Proof of Work chains. It lands next to Dogecoin, which has run one-minute blocks in production for years. Against measured results on the same sample: Bitcoin takes a median 27 minutes 10 seconds to reach three confirmations. Litecoin takes 6 minutes 43. The comparison needs one correction, because block time alone flatters the fast chains. A Solana slot of 400 milliseconds is not a final payment; it roots in about 13 seconds. Tron's 3-second blocks are final after about 19 of them, near 57 seconds. Ethereum's 12-second blocks reach finality in roughly 12.8 minutes. The fair measure is time to irreversibility, and on that measure a chain producing one-minute blocks with proof-of-work finality after a few confirmations is competitive for payments. WHAT DOES NOT CHANGE The 21 million supply. The issuance schedule. Fees, which are charged per byte. Capacity per hour, because the block size limit shrinks with the interval. The fact that payments appear before a block is found. WHERE IT STANDS Consensus has not formally locked, and it is moving in one direction. The lock-in window is around 15 November 2026, with activation proposed for 15 May 2027. Support widened through September and October as teams finished their own reviews, and the remaining questions are about implementation rather than about whether to do it at all. The testnet is up and rapidly producing results to get complete support for lock-in for mainnet implementation. Nothing is settled until the technical work and its testing hold up. That is the condition everything else rests on, and it is the right condition. WHERE THIS LEAVES BCH For users already loving 0-conf transactions and smart contract operations on BCH , which is almost instant, nothing changes. Bitcoin Cash is already one of the fastest chains for day to day usages for services that support 0-conf such as NanoGPT, Sideshift and @_paytaca_ and many more. Bitcoin Cash has spent years making its base layer programmable, to become the most powerful Bitcoin based chain in the world. Confirmation time flexibility for exchanges and businesses, tighter clocks for contract finalisation, and a smaller gap between the payment and the proof of it. The direction is set. What remains is the testing. BCH-1 takes no position in consensus. This is simply a informational post about what is happening on Bitcoin Cash.

The BCH-1 Hackcelerator 2026 is complete. In November we opened applications. In March we announced the winners. Then came the part most programs skip: we kept working. THE PROGRAM IN NUMBERS 255 builders registered. 209 hackers competed. 53 projects entered Phase 2. A community Flipstarter doubled the prize pool to $40,000 mid-sprint. Those are the program numbers. They were never the story. THE COHORT 53 projects entered the Phase 2 sprint. The roster, as we introduced them in February: @CashMintLabs · @FundTokens_Cash · GSM Cash · @OPTNLabs · @nexopsbch · @coingraze · Farmer's Dream · CashLabs · @flowguard_ · PayOnce · AuraTrades · CashDropKit · RoastMyBag · Bastian's Confidential Assets · BCHubKey · @rabbitexp_bch · BAZAAR · BCH Ghost · CashAgent · TrustBCH · TripFi · Agent X402 · InvoiceFlow · sendX · Shardium (Dead Hand Protocol) · VChess · SecureVote · TicketScan · ChainKit SDK · dance.cash · @bchintents and more A few of these like dance.cash were mature projects before BCH-1, so credit is not all claimed here. One winner auditing another, half a dozen live products, and a longer tail still building. That's a cohort. AFTER THE PRIZES Most hackathons end at demo day. We treated March 6 as a midpoint. For the six months since, BCH-1 ran continuous post-hackcelerator support: guidance calls, contract review connections, alumni spotlights, introductions, month after month. The goal was never a demo video. It was shippable, investable projects. The teams met the moment. NexOps, our overall winner, audited the contracts of CashMint, our runner-up became the flagship NFT marketplace on Bitcoin Cash, before launching AI agents launched. @BCHMinty graduated its bonding curve in four hours and climbed to a top-ten Cauldron ranking. BCH Intents shipped order types and an SDK. FlowGuard went live streaming payments with a real stablecoin. OPTN shipped a covenant wallet on Google Play and an x402 payments package on npm. Fun(d) Tokens deployed its first on-chain basket. Alumni auditing alumni. Alumni launching tokens. Alumni building through a flat summer. WHAT COMES NEXT The Hackcelerator chapter is closed. The relationships are not. For the next hackathon on Bitcoin Cash, check out @bchblaze . They will continue to bring more projects onboard Bitcoin Cash this year. Bitcoin Cash is just getting started. Our work with these teams continues into the next phase of BCH-1. The evolution is coming. bitcoin-cash:native