The milestone, reported on July 30, 2026, follows a mainnet upgrade dubbed IIP-665/v1.20.1 that pushed block times consistently below the 0.6-second threshold. A year of incremental speed gainsBack in November 2025, the network launched its native EVM mainnet with block times of 0.64 seconds. Then came the April 28, 2026 upgrade, version 1.19.0, which cut block finality from 1.2 seconds down to 0.7 seconds. The competitive landscape is heating upSolana, the most prominent speed-focused chain, has historically advertised 400-millisecond block times, though its actual performance has varied due to network congestion and outage episodes. The risk, as always with performance-focused upgrades, is that speed gains come at the cost of decentralization or security.