Overview
- BNB Chain tested swapping ECDSA for ML-DSA-44 on BNB Smart Chain and used pqSTARK to aggregate validator votes.
- Signature data jumped from 65 bytes to about 2,420 bytes, pushing transactions from roughly 110 bytes to about 2.5 KB and blocks to around 2 MB.
- Measured performance fell as native transfer throughput dropped from 4,973 to 2,997 TPS and gas throughput halved in stress tests.
- pqSTARK cut six validators’ raw vote data from about 14.5 KB to roughly 340 bytes, a near 43:1 compression that kept validator overhead manageable.
- The design keeps current addresses and tooling intact, yet production would still need network scaling and separate upgrades for P2P handshakes using ML-KEM and for KZG commitments.