Eleven Ethereum upgrades, folded into one vote, with zero changes to token supply. That is what VeChain validators and StarGate NFT holders approved between August 10 and August 17, and it is the biggest technical shift VeChainThor has taken on in years. The VeChain Interstellar upgrade, formally known as VIP-255, is set to activate on September 16 at an estimated block height of 25,902,540, and it pulls features from three separate Ethereum hard forks into a single release.
VeChain has run its own EVM-compatible chain since 2018, but it has always lagged a step or two behind Ethereum’s feature set. Interstellar closes most of that gap in one move, without touching how VET or VTHO work. No supply adjustments, no staking changes, no migration for holders. It only changes what smart contracts on VeChainThor can do.
What VIP-255 Actually Changes
The bundle covers eleven EIPs originally built for Ethereum’s Cancun, Prague, and Osaka releases. Transient storage (EIP-1153) adds two new opcodes, TLOAD and TSTORE, that let a contract hold temporary data for the length of a single transaction instead of writing it permanently to disk. That sounds small, but it makes reentrancy guards and multi-step calculations dramatically cheaper to run. MCOPY (EIP-5656) speeds up memory copying inside the EVM, which matters because modern Solidity and Vyper compilers already assume it exists.
Two more changes tighten up the network’s edges. EIP-7825 caps gas per transaction at 16,777,216 units, and EIP-7934 limits block size to 8 MiB of RLP-encoded data. Neither one adds a flashy feature. Both make the network’s behavior more predictable under load, which is exactly the kind of unglamorous engineering that keeps a chain from breaking when usage spikes.
Cryptography Built for Zero-Knowledge Systems and Passkeys
The most consequential pieces of Interstellar are two cryptographic precompiles. EIP-2537 bakes BLS12-381 curve operations directly into the protocol, the same curve used by modern zero-knowledge proof systems and cross-chain signature aggregation schemes. Running those operations as native precompiles instead of smart-contract bytecode cuts the gas cost enough to make on-chain verification practical rather than theoretical.
EIP-7951 adds support for the secp256r1 curve, the one used inside phone secure enclaves and hardware security keys. That is the curve behind FIDO2 and WebAuthn, the standards powering passkey logins on most phones and laptops today. Add secp256r1 verification to a blockchain and wallets built on top of it can authenticate users with a fingerprint or face scan instead of a 12-word seed phrase, something few EVM chains support natively yet.
Why It Matters Beyond VeChain
VeChain built its early reputation on supply-chain tracking for brands like Walmart China and BMW, not on DeFi or developer tooling. Interstellar is a bet that closing the EVM gap will pull in builders who currently default to Ethereum, Arbitrum, or other chains just because the tooling is more complete. Historical block access (EIP-2935) helps too, letting contracts query the last 8,191 blocks directly from state instead of leaning on external oracles for basic lookups.
The pattern of borrowing directly from Ethereum’s own roadmap rather than reinventing it is becoming the norm across the industry, something we covered in our look at Ethereum’s 2026 protocol roadmap. Chains that once competed on being different from Ethereum are increasingly competing on how fast they can absorb its best ideas, and VeChain just set a fairly aggressive pace: eleven EIPs, one vote, one upgrade window.
Source: VeChain’s official Interstellar announcement, with additional reporting from CoinMarketCap.