BNB Chain's Pasteur Hard Fork Boosts Transaction Capacity by Up to 88%

The BNB Chain has activated its Pasteur hard fork to strengthen bridge security and increase transaction capacity. The upgrade combines three Evolution Proposals (BEPs) that address validator authorization, key rotation, and slashing. With the new route, builders can submit blocks they have already executed, reducing repeated work and increasing throughput by about 88% in tests.

The Pasteur hard fork targets fuller blocks during busy periods, aiming to fit more transactions into each block without changing the 450-millisecond block time. The upgrade also prevents validators from being counted multiple times in bridge approvals, removes authority from old validator keys, and restricts voting rights for restricted addresses.

In tests on QANet, an internal environment designed to mirror BSC's geographically distributed validators, the new route increased throughput by about 88%, from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second. The average gas used per block rose from 46.35 million to 84.15 million, while the block interval and 100-million gas limit remained unchanged.

The BNB Chain said that the figures came from a controlled test workload and were not mainnet measurements. Pasteur follows previous upgrades centered on reducing block times, including the Maxwell hard fork in June 2025, which reduced average block time from 1.5 seconds to about 0.8 seconds.