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.