BNB Chain Pasteur Upgrade Nearly Doubles Throughput

Scheduled hard forks are the least dramatic events in crypto and often the most informative. BNB Smart Chain activated its Pasteur upgrade on mainnet at 02:30 UTC on August 25, 2026, a planned fork supported by the full validator set with no snapshot, no new coin and no action required from ordinary holders. What it delivers is a throughput increase and two specific security tightenings, and the mechanism behind each is worth understanding.

• Pasteur bundles three proposals under BEP-673: BEP-682 for bridge verification, BEP-695 for validator key management, and BEP-675 for block efficiency
• Testnet benchmarks showed transaction capacity rising from 1,237 to 2,324 TPS at the same block time, with average gas usage moving from 46.35 million to 84.15 million against a 100 million limit
• BEP-675 has builders submit pre-executed blocks, cutting validator processing time from 125ms to 15ms while the 450ms block interval stays unchanged
• Node operators needed to run version 1.7.7 before activation, removing EnableBAL from their config files

How Pre-Executed Blocks Nearly Double Capacity

The throughput gain does not come from raising a limit — it comes from removing work from the critical path. In a conventional design, a validator receives a block and must execute every transaction in it before deciding whether to attest, and that execution has to finish inside the block interval.

BEP-675 shifts that execution to the builder, which submits a block that has already been run. The validator's job narrows to verification, and the measured time for that step drops from 125ms to 15ms. With 110 milliseconds freed inside the same 450ms window, the chain can carry substantially more gas per block without touching the interval — hence testnet gas usage climbing from roughly 46 million to 84 million, and TPS following.

That is a more durable form of scaling than simply raising the gas limit, because it addresses why the ceiling existed rather than moving it. It is the same category of improvement as World Chain shipping EIP-7928 block access lists, where the win comes from telling nodes in advance what a block will touch.

What Do BEP-682 and BEP-695 Actually Close?

BEP-682 addresses cross-chain bridge verification. Bridges rely on a threshold of validator signatures, and the fix ensures that threshold counts distinct validators rather than repeated representations of the same one. Rejecting duplicate entries closes a loophole where a signature set could appear to meet the bar without genuinely independent attestation — a subtle accounting bug of exactly the kind bridges have historically suffered from.

BEP-695 covers validator key rotation. When a validator rotates keys, the proposal ensures old keys lose their permissions rather than lingering with residual authority, that pending penalties transfer to the new key, and that blacklist protections extend to governance voting so restricted addresses cannot vote. Both changes are the unglamorous hygiene that determines whether a chain's security model holds under adversarial conditions.

What Holders Needed to Do

Nothing. Pasteur was a coordinated protocol upgrade with the full validator set participating — there was no chain split, no airdrop and no 1:1 credit of any kind. Anyone promising otherwise around a scheduled fork is describing something that did not happen. The only operational requirement fell on node operators, who needed client version 1.7.7 in place before activation.

For readers following network-level upgrades rather than price action, this is the useful lens: capacity gains that come from restructuring the validation pipeline tend to compound, while gains from raising limits tend to run into the same wall again. More protocol and market coverage is on our crypto page, including Ethereum's Hegota upgrade shortlist.

Sources: The Crypto Times — August 25, 2026; Tangem — August 2026; GN Crypto — August 2026.