BNB Chain is activating its Pasteur hard fork on August 25, 2026, at 02:30 AM UTC, introducing improvements to bridge verification, validator key management, and block capacity across BNB Smart Chain (BSC). Node operators are required to upgrade to client version 1.7.7 before activation.
The upgrade has been running on BSC’s testnet since July 21. Its main proposals are grouped under BEP-673 and include BEP-682, BEP-695, and BEP-675. BEP-682 strengthens cross-chain bridge verification by rejecting duplicate validator entries, ensuring the voting threshold reflects a true validator supermajority. BEP-695 changes how validator keys retire, preventing old consensus keys from retaining authority after rotation and stopping blacklisted addresses from bypassing restrictions through signature-based governance voting.
BEP-675 is the most visible performance change. It allows builders to submit blocks they have already executed, shifting validator verification outside the critical block-production path. On the QANet test environment, validator processing on that path dropped from 125 milliseconds to 15 milliseconds, average block gas usage rose from 46.35 million to 84.15 million, and throughput increased from 1,237 TPS to 2,324 TPS while BSC maintained its 450-millisecond block interval and existing finality lag.
The Pasteur hard fork supports BNB Chain’s broader scaling roadmap, which targets doubling mainnet throughput in the second half of 2026 and a longer-term tenfold performance improvement across the ecosystem. Earlier upgrades have already reduced BSC block intervals to 450 milliseconds, cut in-memory finality to 650 milliseconds, and raised benchmark throughput to about 5,200 TPS.
Most developers and regular users do not need to migrate. Node operators must ensure client v1.7 is installed and remove the [Eth] EnableBAL setting from config.toml, as leaving it in place could prevent the updated node from starting.
