Engineering

AERE goes sub-second, 0.5s block time live

By AERE Network May 31, 2026 4 min read

On May 31, 2026 at block 2,138,451, AERE Network's QBFT consensus block period transitioned from 1 second to 0.5 seconds (500 milliseconds). Same Besu binary, same EVM ruleset, same validator set, same chain ID. Zero downtime. Every transaction on AERE now finalises in half the time it did this morning.

What this changes for users: a consumer-app payment, an AereSwap quote, an NFT mint, a paymaster-sponsored transaction, all confirm in ~500ms instead of ~1s. The chain feels "instant" instead of "fast." For cross-chain UX (Hyperlane, Across), end-to-end latency is dominated by off-chain validators/solvers and doesn't change.

Where AERE sits now

Block time	Chain
12 seconds	Ethereum mainnet
2 seconds	Polygon, Avalanche C-chain, Base
1 second	Arbitrum One (pre-Nitro 250ms config)
0.75 s	BSC Maxwell (Jun 2025)
0.5 s	AERE Network
0.45 s	BSC Fermi (Jan 2026)
0.4 s	Sei v2, Monad
0.25 s	Arbitrum Nitro
~10 ms	MegaETH mini-blocks (centralised sequencer)

AERE now sits in the top tier of EVM-compatible production chains for finality speed, and is the fastest production Besu QBFT chain we're aware of.

How the transition worked

Hyperledger Besu's QBFT supports block-period transitions in genesis.json, a list of {block, newParams} tuples that change consensus parameters at predetermined future block heights. The transition is deterministic and atomic at the block level: all validators agree, the new period takes effect at the target block.

Procedure:

Patched genesis.json on all 3 validators with a transitions array under config.transitions.qbft: {"block": 2138451, "xblockperiodmilliseconds": 500}
Pinned the Besu image to hyperledger/besu:26.4.0 and added JVM tuning (-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=100) so GC pauses can't trigger round changes at the new tighter cadence
Force-recreated all 3 validator containers, rolling, with QBFT 2-of-3 quorum maintained throughout
At block 2,138,451, all validators applied the new period in lockstep. From the next block onward, block times moved to 500ms.

What stays the same

Per-block gas limit. Unchanged. The sum of gas per second doubles, but the per-block cap is the same.
EVM ruleset. Pectra + Fusaka stay active. Smart contracts behave identically.
Security model. QBFT 3-validator BFT tolerance unchanged. Same architecture.
Hardware requirements. No new spec demands. Same hardware, same containers.

What's next

The Tier-1 stack is complete: modern EVM (Pectra+Fusaka), smart wallets, gasless paymaster suite, Hyperlane + Across cross-chain, Pyth oracle, drand randomness, 37.5% deflationary fee burn, MEV-resistant batch DEX, developer fee monetization, and now sub-second finality. The work continues at the application layer: consumer-app launches, MiCA EMT partnership, ecosystem dApp adoption.

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