BNB Chain Completes Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Testing

BNB Chain has announced the completion of its post-quantum cryptography migration testing for transaction signatures and consensus layers, according to ChainCatcher. The testing involved the adoption of the ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium) post-quantum signature algorithm and the pqSTARK aggregation scheme, both standardized by NIST. The report reveals that BNB Chain has replaced its transaction signature method from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44 and switched its consensus vote aggregation from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK. This move aims to counter potential threats posed by quantum computing to the current elliptic curve cryptography systems. However, the post-quantum signatures have significantly increased the on-chain data size, with individual transaction sizes growing from approximately 110 bytes to about 2.5KB. In scenarios with 2000 TPS, block sizes have increased from around 130KB to about 2MB, and TPS in the test environment has decreased by approximately 40%-50%. BNB Chain noted that the current network bottleneck is primarily due to the larger transaction data propagation rather than the consensus protocol itself. Meanwhile, the consensus layer aggregation remains efficient, with pqSTARK achieving a signature compression ratio of about 43:1, keeping the additional burden on validators within a manageable range. The report concludes that existing technology can achieve "quantum-resistant" blockchain deployment, but future challenges remain in addressing network bandwidth and data scalability issues.