Binance BSC successfully implements quantum-resistant upgrade: seamlessly compatible with existing wallet addresses, but "data explosion" becomes the biggest nightmare for scalability

Quantum supremacy approaches, is the blockchain ready? BSC (BNB Smart Chain) released a major technical report today, announcing successful implementation of “Post-Quantum” migration in a test environment. Although this upgrade can perfectly defend against future quantum cracking threats, and user wallet addresses remain unaffected, the heavy cryptographic algorithms also bring side effects: single transaction size skyrocketed by 37 times, causing network TPS to plummet by 40%. This defensive battle reveals a dilemma for the future of blockchain: to be secure, the scalability crisis caused by data bloat must be addressed first.
(Background: Saving Satoshi’s 1.1 million Bitcoins! Paradigm proposes a quantum-resistant solution “PACTs” that proves asset control without transfers)
(Additional background: Solana releases a quantum-resistant upgrade route: two major clients focus on Falcon scheme, ready to adopt post-quantum signature schemes at any time)

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• Phasing out ECDSA, embracing NIST official standard ML-DSA-44
• Painless upgrade! Address format unchanged, consensus compression highly efficient
• Harsh side effects: transaction size surges 37 times, TPS drops drastically

As quantum computing technology advances, the “Shor algorithm” capable of cracking current blockchain cryptography hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the encryption industry. To prepare in advance, BNB Smart Chain (BSC) has conducted a practical trial.

Today (14th), BSC officially released a roughly 4-minute read “BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report.” The report details BSC network’s architecture choices, performance changes, and future challenges after adopting quantum-resistant technology. The official emphasizes that current quantum computers have not yet truly cracked production environment cryptography; this test is a “forward-looking preparation,” not an immediate threat response.

Phasing out ECDSA, embracing NIST official standard ML-DSA-44

Currently, BSC’s transaction signatures mainly rely on elliptic curve cryptography based on discrete logarithms (ECDSA secp256k1), which is extremely vulnerable in the face of quantum computers.

Therefore, in this test, BSC fully replaced transaction signatures with ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium2). This is a lattice-based signature scheme, and the only post-quantum digital signature algorithm officially standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in August 2024 (FIPS 204). BSC chose ML-DSA-44 over higher-grade variants because its security margin is sufficient to handle threats for the next 10 to 20 years, and it offers the fastest verification speed, minimizing impact on on-chain performance.

For consensus aggregation, BSC replaced the original BLS12-381 with pqSTARK technology.

Painless upgrade! Address format unchanged, consensus compression highly efficient

For ordinary users, the most concern is: “After the upgrade, do I need to change my assets and wallets?”

The report provides a reassuring answer: No, you don’t need to. BSC derives addresses from the new ML-DSA-44 public keys using keccak-256 hashing, keeping the address format at the standard 20 bytes. All RPCs, SDKs, and current wallets remain seamlessly compatible.

Moreover, the performance at the consensus layer is also impressive. Using pqSTARK technology, 6 validators’ total original signatures of 14.5 KB are aggregated down to about 340 B, a compression ratio of 43:1, effectively controlling the data footprint on the chain at the consensus layer.

Harsh side effects: transaction size surges 37 times, TPS drops drastically

However, there is no free lunch; the biggest Achilles’ heel of post-quantum cryptography is “massive data size.”

Test results show that after switching to ML-DSA-44, the public key size increases by 20 times, and a single transaction’s signature size jumps from 65 B to 2,420 B. This causes the original ~110 B per transaction to explode to ~2.5 KB (an increase of nearly 37 times), and block size expands to about 2 MB (an 18-fold increase).

This significant data bloat directly hits network throughput:

• In cross-region native transfer tests, TPS (transactions per second) dropped by 40%.
• The main reason for the decline is not computational resource exhaustion, but the oversized transaction data causing the block’s “byte budget” to reach its limit before the “gas budget.”

The report concludes that this migration successfully demonstrates the technical feasibility of integrating post-quantum signatures into BSC’s transaction and consensus layers; but the real future challenge lies in overcoming network and data layer scalability limits. Additionally, P2P handshake protocols and KZG commitments (related to EIP-4844) for quantum-resistant upgrades are left as future tasks.