BNB Chain activated the Pasteur hard fork on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) mainnet on Tuesday. The update closes gaps involving bridge verification and validator authorization, while adding a route intended to fit more transactions into each block. BNB Chain said Pasteur strengthens bridge, staking and governance security without changing BSC’s 450-millisecond block time. The hard fork combines three BNB Evolution Proposals, known as BEPs. BEP-682 rejects duplicate validator entries during cross-chain light-block verification. That change is intended to prevent a validator from being counted more than once when bridge approvals are assessed. BEP-695 tightens controls around validator key rotation, slashing and governance voting. The update removes authority from old validator keys and blocks restricted addresses from taking part in governance votes. Together, those changes address how validators are represented in bridge approvals and how validator credentials and voting rights are managed on the network. Pasteur also changes how specialist builders can submit transaction blocks to validators. Under BSC’s previous route, a builder executed transactions before submitting a proposed block, and the validator executed them again before signing it. BNB Chain said that repeated work took time from builders operating within the 450-millisecond block window, sometimes leaving blocks underfilled. BEP-675 permits builders to submit blocks that they have already executed. Validators check a proposed block against consensus rules, sign it and broadcast it, then complete full execution verification afterward. Builders can still use the earlier route, in which validators execute transactions before signing the block. Tests on QANet, BNB Chain’s internal environment intended to mirror BSC’s geographically distributed validators, reported an increase in throughput of about 88 percent with the new route. The result rose from 1,237 to 2,324 transactions per second. Average gas used per block increased from 46.35 million to 84.15 million, while the block interval and 100-million gas limit remained unchanged. BNB Chain cautioned that the results came from a controlled test workload rather than mainnet measurements. Pasteur follows earlier changes focused on block times. The Maxwell hard fork reduced BSC’s average block time from 1.5 seconds to about 0.8 seconds in June 2025, and BNB Chain said the later Fermi upgrade reduced it to 450 milliseconds. For cryptocurrency users in Somalia and across the Horn of Africa, the practical question is whether this added capacity becomes visible on the live network when transaction demand is high.