Transactions three times smaller, history 8.4 times smaller

Post-quantum signatures are strong, but heavy. An ML-DSA-65 signature and its public key are far larger than the signatures of Ethereum or Cosmos, so a single transaction took almost 11 KB. On top of that, every node kept the whole history of the network from the first block.

Smaller transactions and blocks

• A transfer now takes 3.4 KB instead of 10.8 KB, about three times less.
• A full block of 476 transfers takes 1.7 MB instead of 5.2 MB.
• In a load test with 10,000 accounts the network sustains twice the flow: 100 transactions per second instead of 50. Confirmation latency under heavy load fell from 13.9 to 2.9 seconds.

A node does not need the whole history

• A regular node keeps only recent history. The full record stays on archive nodes, which keep all of it.
• At the same chain height in a test, the history tables take 4.0 MB instead of 34.0 MB, 8.4 times less. The node's whole database is 32% smaller.
• The database's write log no longer grows without bound: 15–25 MB instead of 180–211 MB.

What has not changed

Signatures and checks are not weakened: every transaction is still verified against a full post-quantum signature. Transaction hashes, addresses and balances do not change. Older transactions read as before, and an archive node returns any old transaction with its signature unchanged.

How the network switches over

The new transaction format takes effect at a moment in time that validators approve by a governance vote, and upgraded nodes switch at the same moment. A node that falls behind catches up after its upgrade without starting over from scratch. A test covered exactly that: one of four nodes was upgraded after the switch.

What it gives

Validators need less disk, and blocks spread across the network faster. Running a node gets easier, and the network carries more traffic with the same security.