Binance Smart Chain Edges Closer to Quantum-Resistant Security

BNB Chain's efforts to enhance the security of its Binance Smart Chain (BSC) through post-quantum cryptography have shown promising results, albeit with some trade-offs. The recent test of ML-DSA-44 signatures and pqSTARK for consensus vote aggregation revealed a substantial increase in data size, which led to a significant decrease in throughput.

The report highlights that the migration from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44 resulted in transaction signatures expanding from 65 bytes to 2,420 bytes. Consequently, the full transaction size grew from 110 bytes to approximately 2.5 KB. This added load had a noticeable impact on performance, causing block sizes to increase to about 2 MB and throughput to drop by around 40% to 50% in testing.

Despite these challenges, the test demonstrated that BSC can maintain compatibility with existing systems, including addresses, RPCs, SDKs, wallets, and transaction flows. This means users and builders would not need to change their basic account formats if the design is implemented in production. However, the report emphasizes that data growth and network limits remain significant hurdles to overcome.