TL;DR:
- BNB Chain published a technical report on post-quantum cryptography migration for BSC, based on the NIST FIPS 204 standard.
- Transaction signatures migrate to ML-DSA-44 and consensus votes to pqSTARK, with blocks growing up to ~2 MB at 2,000 TPS.
- Tests showed a throughput drop of between 40% and 50%, although the median finality latency held at 2 slots across all scenarios.
BNB Chain published a technical report on BSC’s migration toward post-quantum cryptography, assessing the feasibility of replacing current cryptographic algorithms before quantum computers pose a material threat to production systems. The document, titled *BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report*, clarifies that the work responds to long-term planning and not to an immediate problem.
The Shor algorithm can break systems based on discrete logarithms, including ECDSA and BLS12-381, in polynomial time. In August 2024, NIST formally published the FIPS 204 standard, which standardizes ML-DSA (also known as Dilithium) as a post-quantum digital signature algorithm. That publication determined the availability of a production-ready defense and served as the foundation for the migration assessed in BNB Chain’s report.
Quantum computing is advancing, but it is not yet at a stage where it can break production blockchain cryptography in real-world systems.
That said, long-term preparation matters.
We’ve published a research report exploring how BSC could migrate core cryptographic systems to… pic.twitter.com/0ntWYPzibS
— BNB Chain (@BNBCHAIN) May 14, 2026
BNB Chain Determines the Technical Costs of Migration
The migration covers two of BSC’s four cryptographic layers. Transaction signatures move from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44 (security level 2, equivalent to AES-128), and consensus vote aggregation migrates from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK. The P2P layer and KZG commitments remain out of scope for this proposal, given their lower relative priority or their dependence on the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to BNB Chain, the changes come at a determined cost. The public key grows from 64 to 1,312 bytes and the signature from 65 to 2,420 bytes, bringing the size of transactions from 110 bytes to approximately 2.5 KB. At 2,000 TPS of native transfers, the block grows to around ~2 MB, compared to the current ~130 KB. In cross-region tests, the TPS ceiling for native transfers dropped 40% and throughput in megagas per second fell 50%.
The Post-Quantum Future Is Within Reach
The consensus layer shows more efficient behavior. Six validator signatures totaling 14.5 KB are compressed into an aggregated proof of ~340 bytes, representing a compression ratio of approximately 43:1. The median finality latency held at 2 slots across all evaluated scenarios, with observable degradation only at the 99th percentile, attributed to larger block propagation across regions.
BNB Chain’s report concludes that post-quantum migration is achievable with current approaches, although it identifies scale constraints at the network and data layer as the main challenge for production deployment.
