ICYMI - last week, we announced the passing of the Interstellar vote - the third upgrade under the VeChain Renaissance series. With the community voting complete, VIP-255 formally gets the green light to merge with mainnet. The package is dense: Eleven Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), packaged into a single, major protocol upgrade for VeChainThor, adding many new features and capabilities. We’ll share three long form posts this week to break it all down, and make things a little easier to digest as we gear to up go-live. Part 1: Interstellar Explained - New EVM Opcodes EIP-1153 - transient storage: A scratchpad for contracts, priced at 100 gas, wiped clean at the end of execution rather than written into permanent storage. Human version: Contracts get a whiteboard instead of renting a filing cabinet. Same working space, a fraction of the cost, but they get wiped before anyone can take anything off it. How it changes VeChain: On VeChainThor the scratchpad clears at every clause boundary rather than at the end of the transaction, which wires it into the multi-clause model and hands ported contracts a stricter default than Ethereum gives them. Long term impact: cheaper reentrancy protection and cheaper multi-step state, which is key to running serious DeFi applications. EIP-5656 - MCOPY: A dedicated instruction for copying data in memory, replacing the expensive loop compilers have emitted for years. Human version: Copy and paste, finally. Contracts have been retyping the whole page by hand this entire time, and somebody was paying by the keystroke. How it changes VeChain: Every contract that moves calldata or handles dynamic arrays pays less, and the savings multiply most on fee delegation, where a business, dev or dApp treasury pays the gas instead of the user. Long term impact: sponsored onboarding gets cheaper per head, so the same budget brings more users onto the network. EIP-6780 - updated SELFDESTRUCT: A contract wiping itself now forwards its balance instead of erasing its code, matching where Ethereum's long-term storage design is heading. Human version: Contracts can no longer vanish without a trace, they hand over the crypto first and leave the paperwork behind. How it changes VeChain: The exemption is scoped per clause on VeChainThor, so a contract is deleted outright only when it was created inside the clause that destroys it. Because accounts hold both VET and VTHO, both balances move to the recipient with a Transfer event on the VTHO contract. Long term impact: contract lifecycle stays aligned with Ethereum audit tooling, which matters when external parties have to sign off before bringing something to production. EIP-7939 - count leading zeros: A 5 gas instruction, CLZ, for a bit-counting operation that fixed-point maths and square roots currently rebuild in Solidity at far greater cost. Human version: A tiny sum the chain used to do the long way round. By the 10,000th transaction, the impact adds up in lost efficiency. How it changes VeChain: Efficiency gains at scale. Long term impact: the arithmetic behind zero-knowledge and compression work runs cheaper on VeChainThor. For VeChain, better alignment with the EVM are vital for helping interconnect VeChainThor with the wider crypto industry. For bringing agentic commerce, sustainability, and business applications at scale, interoperability are becoming more important than ever. Tomorrow, in part two, we’ll cover VIP-255's cryptographic precompiles, what they are and what they do. Which of the above are you most curious about? Tell us below!(VeChain)