VeChain Interstellar on September 16: What VET Holders Should Check Before the Hardfork

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. Block height instead of clock time: why the date is only approximate 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 deviation that decides whether activation arrives on schedule, a quarter of an hour later or half a day later.