BNB Smart Chain, one of the busiest EVM-compatible networks by transaction activity and total value locked, will undergo its next coordinated protocol upgrade on August 25, when the Pasteur hard fork goes live with security fixes for cross-chain bridges and validator key management alongside tested gains in throughput. The network's block interval and gas limits will remain unchanged.

According to BNB Chain's Pasteur announcement, the hard fork activates at 2:30 a.m. UTC on August 25, following Chapel testnet work that began on July 21. The upgrade is packaged under BEP-673 and bundles three proposals into a single coordinated mainnet cutover.

Stricter Bridge Verification and Validator Controls

BEP-682 tightens cross-chain bridge verification by rejecting duplicate validator signatures before transfer approvals are counted. Under the previous behavior, repeated validator entries could inflate voting power and allow a smaller number of genuine signatures to satisfy the threshold.

The tightening lands in a category with a costly track record: bridges have repeatedly ranked among the most-exploited targets in crypto, and BNB Chain itself suffered one of the largest exploits on record in October 2022, when roughly $570 million in BNB was moved off the network's cross-chain bridge through a forged proof before validators suspended the network and froze most of the funds. BEP-682 addresses the same bridge-verification domain that the 2022 attack exploited.

BEP-695 hardens staking and governance around key rotations. Retired consensus keys lose their administrative authority, pending penalties remain attached to a validator across rotations, and blacklisted addresses are barred from joining signature-based governance votes. The changes are relevant to anyone moving assets across bridges or following blockchain upgrades that tighten validator discipline.

New Block Processing Path Aims at Higher Capacity

BEP-675 reworks how builders and validators divide work during block production. Builders can submit fully executed blocks for validator review rather than forcing every validator to immediately re-run the same execution path. The division of labor recalls the proposer-builder separation concept long discussed for Ethereum's roadmap.

The design preserves the 450-millisecond block interval and existing gas limits. In controlled QANet testing, validator processing time fell from 125 milliseconds to 15 milliseconds, and throughput rose from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second under the same conditions. Average block gas usage also increased in those tests. BNB Chain stressed that these figures come from controlled environments, not live mainnet traffic, and any live-network effect depends on how many builders adopt the new processing path.

Node Operators Face an Aug. 25 Deadline

Mainnet node operators must run BSC client v1.7.7 before activation or risk falling out of sync. Operators must also remove the EnableBAL setting from their configuration files; otherwise the updated client will not start. Several outdated command-line options are removed or disabled in the release.

Most application developers and everyday users will not need to perform a migration. Block builders that adopt the new processing path must run full nodes rather than fast nodes.

Pasteur follows the earlier Fermi and Osaka/Mendel upgrades, which cut block times. This release shifts the focus toward stronger bridge and validator security plus higher capacity under the same block cadence, with the pace of builder adoption and how closely live mainnet throughput tracks the QANet results the clearest signals to watch in the weeks after activation.