BNB Chain has confirmed that its Pasteur hard fork will activate on the BNB Smart Chain mainnet at 02:30 UTC on August 25, 2026. The upgrade was announced on August 14 and groups three proposals—BEP-682, BEP-695, and BEP-675—under the BEP-673 meta upgrade. Node operators must install BSC client v1.7.7 before the deadline and remove the outdated EnableBAL setting to avoid startup errors or falling off the network.
The first proposal, BEP-682, fixes a cross-chain transfer verification flaw in which a crafted validator set could list the same signer multiple times and clear the supermajority threshold with fewer genuine approvals. Pasteur will reject repeated validator entries before counting signatures, ensuring cross-chain transfers require the proper number of separate validators.
The second proposal, BEP-695, tightens staking and governance controls. Rotated-out validator keys will lose admin privileges, validators facing eviction can no longer avoid it by rotating keys, and blacklisted addresses will be blocked from indirect signature-based governance votes.
The third proposal, BEP-675, changes block execution to avoid duplicating work between builders and validators. In internal QANet tests, validator execution-layer time fell from 125 milliseconds to 15 milliseconds, throughput rose from 1,237 TPS to 2,324 TPS, and average block gas usage increased from 46.35% to 84.15%—while the 450 ms block time and 100 million gas limit remained unchanged. BNB Chain cautioned that these are controlled-workload figures and live results may differ.
The upgrade follows the Fermi hard fork in January 2026, which cut BSC block times to 0.45 seconds, and the Osaka/Mendel upgrade in April, which introduced nine network proposals. BNB Chain has themed its hard forks after scientists including Pascal, Maxwell, Fermi, Mendel, and now Pasteur.
For U.S. investors, the VanEck BNB ETF trades on Nasdaq under the ticker VBNB. An August 7 SEC filing disclosed that BitGo Bank & Trust has been appointed as an additional custodian for the fund’s BNB holdings, with safeguards preventing lending, pledging, or reusing the assets without permission.
