$BNB Chain tested a post-quantum cryptography upgrade for BSC, but the trial showed clear costs: increased data load and lower throughput.
$BNB Chain released its BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report on May 14. The report states that BSC tested post-quantum transaction signatures with ML-DSA-44 and used pqSTARK for consensus voting collection.
According to the report, the migration can work with current BSC systems. It remains compatible with existing addresses, RPCs, SDKs, wallets, and transaction flows. That means users and builders don’t need to change basic account formats when the design goes into production.
$BNB Chain said, “Post-quantum readiness is achievable on BSC today,” but added that data growth and network limits remain the key considerations. The team also said that quantum computers are “not yet at a stage” where they can break current production cryptography in real systems.
BSC TPS decreases as signature size increases
The biggest problem came from data size. $BNB Chain said transaction signatures increased from 65 bytes to 2,420 bytes after moving from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44. The full transaction size increased from 110 bytes to approximately 2.5 KB.
This provided additional load reduction during testing. According to the report, block size grew to about 2 MB, while throughput dropped by about 40% to 50% in tests. In cross-region conditions, TPS dropped by about 40%, showing that network propagation becomes more difficult when blocks contain more data.
According to the report, finality remained at two slots in the average cases. The larger gap in slower cases arose from larger blocks spreading across regions, not from a failure in consensus design.
pqSTARK aggregation keeps the validator load manageable
$BNB Chain said the consensus voting aggregation outperformed the transaction layer. pqSTARK aggregation yielded approximately 43:1 compression, keeping the validator overhead manageable during the test.
The upgrade did not include every part of BSC’s cryptographic system. The report states that peer-to-peer handshakes and KZG pledges are left out of the current migration. P2P migration would require ML-KEM, while KZG replacement would require broader coordination of the Ethereum ecosystem.
The test shows that BSC can move towards quantum-resistant security, but not without scaling up the work. $BNB Chain the said network and>$BNB The chain speed roadmap faces a new trade-off
The post-quantum test adds a new layer $BNB Chain’s broader performance roadmap. Related reports noted that $BNB Chain aims for finality of less than 150 milliseconds and more than 20,000 TPS for complex transactions by 2026.
That speed goal must now match quantum-resistant security work. The latest test shows that BSC can adopt ML-DSA-44 and pqSTARK, but larger signatures can make high-throughput targets more difficult without better data processing and network scaling.