BNB Chain Activates Pasteur Hard Fork to Boost Security and Block Capacity

BNB Chain has activated its Pasteur hard fork on Tuesday, implementing security upgrades and improving block throughput. The upgrade strengthens the network's bridge, staking, and governance security while increasing blocks' capacity without altering the 450-millisecond block time.

Pasteur combines three BNB Evolution Proposals (BEPs), which reject duplicate validator entries during cross-chain light-block verification, tighten controls involving validator key rotation, slashing, and governance voting, and change how specialist builders submit blocks to validators. The upgrade prevents validators from being counted more than once in bridge approvals, removes authority from old validator keys, and restricts voting from addresses with authority.

The new route allows builders to submit blocks they've already executed, increasing throughput by about 88% in internal tests conducted on QANet. BNB Chain cautioned that the figures came from a controlled test workload and were not mainnet measurements. The upgrade follows previous upgrades aimed at reducing block times, with Maxwell reducing average block time from 1.5 seconds to around 0.8 seconds in June 2025.