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On Wednesday, September 16, 2026, the VeChainThor network switches on the Interstellar hardfork. The point that matters for you as a holder: the switchover is not a time of day but a block height. Activation happens at block 25,902,540, and when exactly that block falls is for the chain itself to decide. Anyone holding VET on an exchange will lose the ability to deposit and withdraw for a few hours around that point. Anyone running their own node has to swap the software beforehand. Anyone holding their tokens in self-custody needs to do nothing at all.
For this article cryptoticker.io did not take the announcement on trust but measured: the mainnet’s actual block time across three time windows, and the software versions of the nodes a public VeChain node can see at this moment. Both measurements appear further down with date, method and sample size.
Interstellar and VIP-255: what is being changed on VeChainThor
Interstellar is the name of the upgrade, VIP-255 the number of the improvement proposal behind it. VIP stands for VeChain Improvement Proposal and denotes a formal proposal to change the protocol, voted on by the holders of Authority and Economic nodes. According to VeChain, the vote on VIP-255 ran from August 10 to 17, 2026 on the VeVote platform and passed.
In substance, Interstellar brings the VeChainThor virtual machine up to Ethereum’s level. Eleven Ethereum improvement proposals from the Cancun, Prague and Osaka upgrades are adopted in a single fork: EIP-1153, EIP-5656, EIP-6780, EIP-7939, EIP-2537, EIP-7951, EIP-7823, EIP-7883, EIP-2935, EIP-7825 and EIP-7934. A hardfork is a protocol change that is not backwards compatible: nodes running old software treat the new blocks as invalid and drop out of consensus.
What Interstellar expressly does not touch is set out in the VeChain team’s official announcement: there is no token migration, no swap, no new contract addresses, no change to the VET supply, to VTHO generation or to the staking rules. Blob transactions, of the kind Ethereum introduced for rollups, are not part of the package.
Chain upgrades are tied to a block number because every node sees the same block number but not the same clock. For you that means every time of day you read about Interstellar is a projection. It is only as accurate as the chain keeps its rhythm.
VeChainThor works with fixed ten-second slots. If the authority node responsible produces no block in its slot, the slot stays empty and the average time per block rises above ten seconds. It is precisely that dequarter of an hour later or half a day later
Activation on the testnet came at block 25,891,380 according to the node software release notes and took place around September 9. The mainnet follows at block 25,902,540.
Our measurement: 10.0012 seconds per block over 24 hours
This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 12, 2026. Method: the current block was fetched through the public node mainnet.vechain.org and compared with the blocks 8,640, 60,480 and 259,200 positions earlier; the difference between the timestamps gives the mean block time in each window. That amounts to 259,200 blocks examined, roughly thirty days.
The state at the time of measurement: block 25,870,700, timestamp 18:54:10 UTC on September 12, 2026. That left 31,840 blocks to go until activation.
- 24 hours: 8,640 blocks in 86,410 seconds, a mean of 10.0012 seconds per block. A single slot stayed empty.
- 7 days: 60,480 blocks in 604,960 seconds, a mean of 10.0026 seconds. 16 empty slots, or 0.03 percent.
- 30 days: 259,200 blocks in 2,592,400 seconds, a mean of 10.0015 seconds. 40 empty slots, or 0.02 percent.
Projecting the remaining 31,840 blocks forward at those three rates puts activation on September 16, 2026 between 11:21 and 11:22 UTC. The VeChain team’s announcement names 11:15 UTC. The gap of some six minutes arises because the announcement assumes a flat ten seconds, while the chain runs one to three thousandths above that on average.
The practical lesson from these figures is that VeChain keeps its rhythm remarkably clean. On a chain that misses 40 out of 259,240 slots in thirty days, an activation date four days out shifts by minutes, not hours. So you can plan for the morning of September 16, but you should not schedule a window that has to be accurate to within ten minutes.
Thor v2.5.0: the node version that supports Interstellar
The network’s reference software is called Thor. Release v2.5.0 from the start of September contains the Interstellar rules along with both activation heights, for testnet and mainnet. The release notes state the obligation plainly: operators have to update to v2.5.0 before the relevant block height. Configuration files do not need to be touched; the update runs in place.
Everyone running a node of their own is affected: authority masternodes, public RPC providers, exchanges, custodians and every company with its own connection to the chain. Anyone operating an application that talks through a third-party RPC endpoint depends on that provider’s update discipline.
Regulated crypto exchanges compared
79 percent of the visible nodes are ready, 21 percent are not
On to the second measurement of our own. The peers endpoint of a public VeChain node reveals the software identifier of every counterparty it is currently connected to. cryptoticker.io queried that endpoint six times at two-second intervals on September 12, 2026 at 18:55 UTC and deduplicated the responses by peer identifier. The result: 105 unique counterparties.
- 83 nodes were running Thor v2.5.0 and are therefore equipped for Interstellar. That is 79.0 percent.
- 22 nodes were running older releases: 15 on v2.4.4, three on v2.4.0, two on v2.4.2, and one each on v2.4.1 and v2.4.3.
Those 21 percent are no reason to panic, but they are not nothing either. A node on v2.4.x will reject the blocks produced after the fork and remain stuck at the old state. That becomes noticeable to you as a user if your wallet or your portfolio tracker talks to exactly such an endpoint: balances and transactions appear to freeze there even though everything continues on the chain.
What this measurement does not show belongs in the picture as well. It is one public node’s view of its immediate counterparties and therefore not a complete picture of the network. Whether the authority masternodes that actually produce the blocks have been updated cannot be read from it, because the peer list names versions but not roles. The low rate of empty slots suggests block production is running stably; it is not evidence of the producers’ software versions.
Binance suspends VET deposits and withdrawals: the window on September 16
Exchanges follow a standard procedure at hardforks: they stop deposits and withdrawals some time before activation, update their nodes, wait for a few confirmations and reopen. On September 11 Binance announced that it would suspend VET deposits and withdrawals from September 16 at 19:15 Korean time, which corresponds to 10:15 UTC. Trading itself continues during the pause according to the announcement; deposits and withdrawals will be released again once the network is stable.
Three practical consequences follow. First, if you want to move VET from an exchange to your own wallet before the fork, plan that for September 15 or the morning of September 16 by 10:00 UTC at the latest. Second, a pause on transfers is not a trading pause; your holding remains sellable. Third, reopening “after stabilisation” is a soft deadline with no time attached, and it occasionally takes half a day.
Other trading venues announce such pauses individually, usually in their announcements or status area. Whether your provider has announced anything at all is the question you have to settle yourself: how to reach the pages that can be relied on is set out in our guide to exchange status pages. If you want to check at the same time how transparently your trading venue operates overall, the regulated addresses are in the crypto exchange comparison.
VET in your own wallet: why there is nothing to do here
For self-custodians Interstellar is a non-event. The official announcement states expressly that ordinary VET and VTHO holders need take no action: addresses remain valid, private keys remain valid, holdings do not change. Whatever you have in a hardware or software wallet will still be sitting there unchanged afterwards.
There is one qualification all the same, and it concerns the display rather than the holding. Wallet apps talk to the chain through nodes the maker either runs or buys in. If your app is hooked up to a node still running v2.4.x after the fork, it will show stale data. The remedy is unspectacular: wait a few hours, update the app, and switch the node in the settings if necessary.
Anyone keeping their tokens on an exchange anyway and using the occasion to think about moving into self-custody should take a calm look at the devices and how they differ. A hardfork is a good prompt for that, because it brings home what your access currently depends on.
AdvertisementHardware wallets compared
The eleven EIPs: what developers can use from September 16
The technical core of VIP-255 is the alignment of the VeChainThor VM with Ethereum. Two groups can be distinguished.
New opcodes for contracts
EIP-1153 brings transient storage, meaning storage that exists only for the duration of a transaction and lapses afterwards. That makes reentrancy locks and similar patterns considerably cheaper. EIP-5656 adds the MCOPY instruction for fast copying of memory areas, EIP-6780 restricts the behaviour of SELFDESTRUCT, and EIP-7939 adds an instruction for counting leading zero bits.
Cryptography the chain can verify itself
EIP-2537 brings arithmetic operations on the BLS12-381 curve, EIP-7951 the verification of signatures on the secp256r1 curve. The second curve is the one built into smartphones, security chips and passkeys. For VeChain that means a signature generated by a phone’s security chip can be verified directly on the chain, without an expensive detour through a contract. EIP-2935 makes historical block hashes available through a system contract, and EIP-7823 and EIP-7883 adjust modular exponentiation and its costs.
Gas limit and block size: two new ceilings
Two items in the package affect capacity rather than cryptography. EIP-7825 sets a fixed ceiling on the gas of a single transaction, specifically 16,777,216 gas. EIP-7934 caps the size of a block in its encoded form at 8 mebibytes.
Both limits serve robustness: a single enormous transaction can no longer fill a block on its own, and oversized blocks can no longer crawl through the network. This becomes relevant for developers who deploy very large contracts in one go or pack bulk operations into a single transaction. Anyone running such processes should put them through the testnet before September 16, where Interstellar has been active since September 9.
What can go wrong in a hardfork and how you will notice
The most common disruption is not a chain split but a display gap. Typical symptoms around activation: a withdrawal stays on “processing” longer than usual. A block explorer shows a different state from your wallet. A decentralised application reports errors when sending.
In all three cases waiting is the right first reaction. What you should avoid is the thing fraudsters count on at every upgrade: messages prompting you towards a “migration” or a “wallet verification”. Interstellar involves no migration. Any prompt to enter your seed phrase or to send tokens to an address so that they can be “converted” is an attempted theft.
A second reflex is worth having as well: check deadlines not when they appear in the news but all together. Going through the market‘s current cutoff dates once a month, in one pass, means running into an expired deadline less often.
Timeline to activation
The sequence in the order in which it affects you:
- By September 15: node operators swap their software to Thor v2.5.0. Developers test against the testnet.
- September 16, from around 10:15 UTC: Binance stops VET deposits and withdrawals. Other trading venues set their own windows.
- September 16, around 11:20 UTC: block 25,902,540 falls and Interstellar goes live. On our measurement the point lies six to seven minutes behind the announced time.
- Afterwards: exchanges reopen transfers without a fixed time, as soon as their nodes follow along stably.
Checking VeChain Interstellar: what to take away
- Bring transfers forward. If you want to move VET before the fork, get it done by the morning of September 16. Which trading venues announce such windows cleanly is shown in the crypto exchange comparison.
- Establish what applies to you. Your own node means an obligation to update to Thor v2.5.0; your own wallet means doing nothing. Anyone wanting to settle the difference between an exchange balance and self-custody for good will find the devices in the hardware wallet comparison.
- Stay calm and collect the dates. Display errors after a fork usually resolve themselves; real deadlines do not. Anyone keeping holdings and cutoff dates in one place will find suitable tools in the comparison of analytics platforms.
Thear and VIP-255, and the release notes for Thor v2.5.0 with both activation heights. The block time and version figures come from our own survey of September 12, 2026
(As of September 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primaryI
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Source: cryptoticker.io