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LayerZero Labs has introduced Aerie, a research system whose developers say aggregated 32,768 quantum-resistant Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds on an Apple laptop with no GPU acceleration, according to Crypto.news. The paper, released Oct. 16, credits researchers from LayerZero’s own team, a16z crypto research, Carnegie Mellon University and Imperial College London, and builds on the Akita cryptographic proof system.
The work targets a specific bottleneck in proof-of-stake blockchains: validators sign messages about network state, and other participants must check those signatures. Crypto.news reported that Ethereum combines roughly 32,000 validator votes into one small signature using BLS, which does not withstand quantum attacks, while the post-quantum alternatives chosen by US standards officials lack the same built-in aggregation. Cryptobriefing reported that a16z crypto researcher Justin Thaler frames lattice cryptography as faster to verify and simpler than Ethereum’s proposed hash-based route.
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Key facts
- The Falcon-512 batch was processed with 16 worker threads at peak memory of 2.1 GiB; a second workload of 16,384 Falcon-1024 signatures took 0.63 seconds at similar memory, per Crypto.news.
- Verifying the completed Falcon-512 aggregate took 54 milliseconds on one core versus 519 milliseconds for checking signatures individually; with 16 threads the figures were 11.6 milliseconds and 42.9 milliseconds.
- For the 32,768-signature workload the aggregate came to 1,346 KiB including salts and headers, with the proof component at roughly 66 KiB and a per-signature average of 42.1 bytes, about 16 times smaller than the padded Falcon signatures it replaces.
- Cryptobriefing reported the M4 Max result equates to more than 50,000 signatures per second, and that the advantage over leanVM rose to roughly 60 times for stateless transaction signatures.
- The paper puts Aerie’s Falcon-512 proving throughput at 29 times leanVM’s XMSS throughput under the same conditions, while leanVM proofs verified faster, at 5.9 to 6.5 milliseconds on one thread.
What the benchmarks show
Producing a proof for either workload took roughly 4.3 seconds when the team restricted it to one thread, per the benchmark table. The paper describes the construction plainly: “One proof covers the whole batch, with no recursion.” Avoiding recursion, the authors write, removes the need to build intermediate proofs and merge them across successive rounds, and the design lets another node holding the signatures generate a replacement proof if the original aggregator fails.
Aerie keeps a short random salt from each signature so the verifier can compute the associated hashes directly, with Akita supporting the remaining mathematical checks. Crypto.news reported that a shared salt could bring the full aggregate to about 66 KiB, but that estimate depends on a separate signing policy and security assumptions; the researchers state the estimate does not establish compliance with that policy. Size measurements exclude public keys and messages, which are supplied separately.
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Against Orthus, an earlier Falcon aggregation system, the team reports 1.5 times faster proof generation, 38 times faster verification and proofs 1.7 times smaller on the same server, while noting that Orthus’s workload omits signature-format checks Aerie performs.
Ethereum’s competing path
The Aerie paper compares its approach with leanVM, part of Ethereum’s hash-based aggregation work. Crypto.news reported that leanVM aggregated 900 XMSS signatures in 0.51 seconds using all cores on the same machine. The authors say the hash-based design requires multiple rounds of recursive aggregation, adding cost and complexity. Cryptobriefing reported that Thaler argues relying exclusively on hash-based cryptography cannot deliver all the functionality required for private payments, because public key encryption cannot be constructed from hash functions alone in a general black-box setting, and that Ethereum may eventually need structured systems such as lattices regardless.
Separately, Crypto.news noted an August draft proposing a post-quantum-ready deposit contract with variable-length cryptographic data and a mechanism to retire new BLS deposits; its GitHub record remains a draft submission with outstanding technical feedback. The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Cluster set a December 2029 quantum-resistance target covering execution, consensus and data in its Sept. 7 priorities document, calling a 2030 quantum threat a deliberately aggressive planning assumption, with outside experts expected to help reassess progress from January 2027. NIST lists ML-DSA and SLH-DSA among the signature standards finalized in August 2024 and identifies Falcon as selected for ongoing standardization, with 2035 as the endpoint for removing quantum-vulnerable algorithms. LayerZero says ML-DSA aggregation works inside Aerie, but exact performance figures and implementation details remain pending in its announcement.
Why it matters
Validator signature schemes sit underneath Ethereum’s consensus, so replacing BLS without losing cheap aggregation is one of the harder parts of any post-quantum migration. Aerie offers evidence that lattice-based signatures and lattice-based proofs can be combined directly rather than compressed through recursive layers, which could reduce the operational load on nodes that verify consensus messages. The results come from published benchmarks on a laptop and do not establish how the system would behave across a live blockchain network, and Ethereum has not committed to adopting Aerie while its quantum-resistant architecture stays under development.
What to watch
The Ethereum Foundation’s January 2027 reassessment of quantum-resistance progress is the next scheduled checkpoint on its December 2029 target, and the August deposit-contract draft still needs to clear technical review before any BLS retirement mechanism can advance.
Sources: crypto.news, Cryptobriefing
