BSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report: Transaction Signatures Have Been Upgraded to ML-DSA-44, TPS Decrease Approximately 40%-50%

BNB Chain Post-Quantum Migration Update (May 19) On May 14, BNB Chain released its *BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report*, as announced publicly on May 19. The report confirms that the project has successfully completed post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration testing for two critical BSC layers: transaction signatures and the consensus layer. The migration leverages two NIST-standardized quantum-resistant solutions: the ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium) signature algorithm and the pqSTARK aggregation scheme. Per the document, BSC has upgraded its cryptographic systems: transaction signatures now use ML-DSA-44 in place of ECDSA, and consensus voting aggregation has shifted from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK. This change is designed to mitigate the long-term threat quantum computing poses to the elliptic curve cryptography systems widely used in today’s blockchains. However, the adoption of post-quantum signatures has significantly increased on-chain data volume, with tangible tradeoffs: - Individual transaction size rose from ~110 bytes to approximately 2.5KB - Block size expanded from ~130KB to around 2MB under a 2,000 transactions per second (TPS) workload - Test environment TPS dropped by 40% to 50% compared to pre-migration levels BNB Chain noted that current network bottlenecks stem primarily from expanded transaction data propagation, not issues with the consensus protocol itself. It added that consensus layer aggregation remains highly efficient: pqSTARK delivers a 43:1 signature compression ratio, and the additional load on network validators is within controllable limits. The report concludes that existing technology is sufficient to deploy post-quantumized blockchains, but future efforts will focus on resolving core challenges: network bandwidth constraints and data scalability issues.