BNB Chain Activates Pasteur Hard Fork to Upgrade Security and Capacity

Bridge Security Key Governance TPS Scaling

Eliminating Attack Vectors in Cross-Chain Verification

Cross-chain infrastructure has historically posed massive operational risks across the decentralized finance sector, with bad actors draining billions of dollars through compromised signature keys, smart contract vulnerabilities, and flawed message verification algorithms. Pasteur tackles these exposure points directly through the integration of BEP-682.

Under the previous verification model, light blocks processed across cross-chain bridges did not explicitly filter duplicate node entries.

A malicious actor could theoretically submit repeated validator signatures within a single validation bundle, making a cross-chain transfer appear to carry genuine supermajority approval when it actually relied on a small subset of participants. BEP-682 rewrites this approval flow by stripping out repeated validator entries prior to tallying consensus thresholds, guaranteeing that every cross-chain transfer requires verified support from distinct validators.

Network maintainers emphasized that this measure was deployed preemptively, with no active exploits or asset losses reported before the patch.

Reining In Governance Risks and Operator Key Management

Alongside bridge enhancements, the hard fork tightens protocol governance and administrative key management via BEP-695. Previously, node operators updating their operator keys could exploit administrative loopholes to escape pending slashing penalties or retain elevated access rights using retired keys.

The updated rules immediately revoke management rights from old keys as soon as a rotation takes place, ensuring that operational penalties remain permanently tied to the underlying validator identity. In addition, updated governance contracts now trace off-chain signatures back to their original signing addresses before counting delegated votes.

This check blocks blacklisted or restricted addresses from using proxy accounts to bypass voting bans and influence network decisions indirectly.

Scaling Throughput for Specialist Block Builders

On the performance front, Pasteur introduces BEP-675 to streamline how transaction bundles move from builders to validators. Previously, both block builders and validators were required to execute transaction sets sequentially before signatures could be attached, consuming valuable execution time within the network’s rapid 450-millisecond block interval.

BEP-675 allows specialized builders to submit pre-executed blocks, letting validators check proposal compliance against system rules and sign off immediately before finalizing execution verification.

While builders can continue using traditional block-construction routes via remote procedure call settings, controlled benchmarks on the distributed QANet testbed demonstrated dramatic efficiency gains.

Throughput rose nearly 88%, scaling from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second, while average gas consumption per block expanded from 46.35 million to 84.15 million—all without altering the 100-million gas cap or current block production speeds.

Following earlier latency-focused updates like Fermi and Maxwell, the Pasteur hard fork shifts the platform’s focus toward maximizing block efficiency and establishing rigorous security standards across its expanding ecosystem, which recently crossed 300,000 real-world asset holders.