BNB Chain Completes Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration, Switches Transaction Signatures to ML-DSA-44, TPS Declines 40%-50%

According to BNB Chain’s post-quantum cryptography migration report released on May 19, BSC completed testing to replace transaction signatures with the NIST-standardized ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium) algorithm and switch consensus aggregation from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK to address potential threats from future quantum computing.

The testing revealed that transaction size increased from approximately 110 bytes to 2.5KB, block size grew from about 130KB to 2MB under 2000 TPS conditions, and throughput declined 40%-50% in the test environment. BNB Chain attributed the performance reduction primarily to larger transaction data propagation rather than the consensus protocol itself, noting that pqSTARK maintains a 43:1 signature compression ratio.