BSC releases a report on quantum-resistant cryptography migration: transaction signatures have switched to ML-DSA-44, TPS testing has decreased by about 40%-50%

On May 14, BNB Chain released the "BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report," stating that it has completed the migration testing for quantum-resistant cryptography for transaction signatures and the consensus layer, using the NIST standardized post-quantum signature algorithm ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium) and the pqSTARK aggregation scheme.

The report shows that BSC has replaced transaction signatures from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44 and switched consensus voting aggregation from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK to address the potential threats posed by future quantum computing to the existing elliptic curve cryptography system. However, post-quantum signatures also significantly increase the on-chain data volume: the size of a single transaction has increased from about 110 bytes to approximately 2.5KB; the block size in a 2000 TPS scenario has increased from about 130KB to around 2MB; and the TPS in the testing environment has decreased by about 40%-50%.

BSC stated that the current network bottleneck mainly comes from the larger transaction data propagation, rather than the consensus protocol itself. Meanwhile, the consensus layer aggregation still maintains high efficiency, with pqSTARK achieving a signature compression ratio of about 43:1, and the additional burden on validators remains within a controllable range. The report concludes that existing technology can achieve "quantum-resistant" deployment for blockchain, but future issues related to network bandwidth and data scalability still need to be addressed.