On Tuesday, $BNB Smart Chain (BSC) activated the Pasteur hard fork. The update addressed vulnerabilities in bridge validation and validator authorization, and also introduced a new method to increase the number of transactions per block.
On Tuesday, $BNB Chain confirmed Pasteur's operation on the BSC mainnet. According to the team, the update enhances the security of bridges, staking, and network governance, and increases block capacity without changing their creation time — 450 milliseconds.
The update combines three $BNB development proposals. BEP-682 rejects duplicate validator entries during cross-chain light block validation, while BEP-695 tightens control over validator key rotation, slashing, and governance voting. In turn, BEP-675 changes how blocks are transferred from specialized builders to validators.
The update prevents a single validator from being counted more than once for bridge approvals, revokes authority from old validator keys, and blocks voting for restricted addresses. Simultaneously, it increases the number of transactions in blocks during periods of high load.
Pasteur Aims for Fuller Blocks
Previously, during block formation in BSC, a builder would execute transactions before sending a proposed block, and a validator would re-execute them before signing. $BNB Chain stated that re-execution consumed time for builders working within the 450-millisecond block formation window, sometimes leaving blocks underfilled.
After the BEP-675 update, builders can send blocks they have already executed. Validators check the proposed block for consensus rule compliance, sign and propagate it, and then complete full execution verification. Builders can also continue using the previous method, where validators execute transactions before signing.
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In tests on QANet — an internal environment for simulating geographically distributed BSC validators — the new method increased throughput by approximately 88%: from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second. The average gas per block increased from 46.35 million to 84.15 million, while the block interval and gas limit of 100 million remained unchanged.
$BNB Chain cautioned that these metrics were obtained during controlled test loads. They do not reflect measurement results on the mainnet.
Pasteur continues a series of updates aimed at reducing block creation time. The Maxwell hard fork on BSC reduced average block creation time from 1.5 seconds to approximately 0.8 seconds in June 2025, and $BNB Chain stated that the subsequent Fermi update lowered this figure to 450 milliseconds.
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