Woofun AI reports that BNB Smart Chain (BSC) activated the Pasteur hard fork on Tuesday, targeting critical vulnerabilities in bridge security, staking security, and governance security while expanding block capacity. This deployment by BNB Chain addresses structural gaps in validator authorization and verification processes without modifying the existing 450-millisecond block time.

The upgrade integrates three specific proposals to harden network mechanics. BEP-682 eliminates duplicate validator entries during cross-chain light-block verification, while BEP-695 restricts validator key rotation, slashing, and governance voting to prevent unauthorized actions.

Additionally, BEP-675 modifies how specialist builders interact with validators, blocking restricted addresses from voting and removing authority from old validator keys to ensure only valid entities participate in consensus.

Structurally, the previous block-building route required builders to execute transactions before submitting a proposed block, forcing validators to re-execute them before signing. This redundant process consumed valuable time within the 450-millisecond block window, often resulting in underfilled blocks. Under the new logic, builders submit pre-executed blocks, allowing validators to check against consensus rules, sign, and broadcast immediately, deferring full execution verification to a later stage.

Woofun AI data shows that on QANet, an internal test environment mirroring BSC's geographically distributed validators, this new route increased throughput by 88%, rising from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second. Average gas used per block climbed from 46.35 million to 84.15 million, approaching the 100-million gas limit, though BNB Chain noted these figures reflect a controlled test workload rather than mainnet conditions.

This optimization continues a historical trend of reducing block times to enhance efficiency. The Maxwell hard fork lowered the average block time from 1.5 seconds to 0.8 seconds in June 2025, followed by the Fermi upgrade which achieved the current 450-millisecond standard. This marks the latest step in BNB Chain's iterative performance improvements.