BNB Chain just shipped an upgrade that fixes a real security hole and makes BNB Smart Chain (BSC) noticeably faster, without slowing down blocks. The Pasteur hard fork went live on BSC mainnet on August 25, 2026, and it bundles three proposals that tighten validator security and let blocks carry far more transactions.
A validator bug gets closed
The upgrade’s most important fix targets how BSC verifies cross-chain bridge transactions. Under the old rules, a single validator could sign the same message more than once and get counted as several separate signers. That flaw let a small group of validators fake enough signatures to clear the approval threshold for bridge transfers. BEP-682 shuts that gap by rejecting duplicate validator entries outright, so every signature now has to come from a distinct, legitimate validator.
A second proposal, BEP-695, tightens validator governance. Rotated consensus keys lose their old administrative privileges instead of keeping them. Slashing penalties now follow a validator through a key rotation instead of resetting. Blacklisted addresses can no longer sneak into governance votes. Together, these changes shrink the attack surface around validator control. Other blockchain clients have closed similar security gaps this year, and Pasteur puts BSC in that same camp.
Nearly double the throughput, same block time
The third proposal, BEP-675, changes how block builders assemble transactions. Builders can now submit blocks that are already executed, so validators only need to check consensus rules and signatures instead of re-running every transaction from scratch. In BNB Chain’s internal testing, that cut validator processing overhead from 125 milliseconds to just 15 milliseconds per block.
That efficiency gain translates directly into capacity. Test throughput jumped from 1,237 transactions per second to 2,324 TPS, an 88% increase, while block times held steady at 450 milliseconds and the gas limit stayed at 100 million. BSC simply packs more into each block instead of taking longer to produce one. It’s the same throughput-through-efficiency approach Cardano took with its own scaling upgrade earlier this month.
Why the Pasteur hard fork matters
Most everyday users won’t notice anything change. No wallets need updating, and no funds need moving. But the two fixes together matter for anyone who relies on BSC. Bridge users get real protection against a validator-forgery attack that could have drained cross-chain transfers. Developers building high-traffic apps get more room to operate before the network gets congested.
Validators and node operators do have work to do. They needed to run client version v1.7.7 before the fork activated, or risk falling out of sync with the rest of the network. For a chain that processes billions of dollars in daily volume, closing a validator-forgery bug while nearly doubling block capacity is a meaningful step forward, not just routine maintenance.
Source: BNB Chain’s official Pasteur hard fork announcement