Post-quantum signatures have a weight problem. They typically run 10 to 100 times larger than the classical signatures that blockchains rely on today.
On October 16, 2026, LayerZero Labs unveiled Aerie, a system built to put those signatures on a diet. The research was developed with a16z crypto research, Carnegie Mellon University, and Imperial College London.
What Aerie actually does
Aerie is a signature aggregation system that combines large batches of Falcon signatures, which NIST has standardized as FN-DSA, into a single compact proof. Under the hood, it relies on a lattice-based polynomial commitment scheme called Akita.
The headline benchmarks are notable. Aerie aggregated 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds, and 16,384 Falcon-1024 signatures in 0.63 seconds.
Those runs happened on an Apple M4 Max MacBook Pro using only CPU cores. No GPU acceleration was involved.
Throughput lands at roughly 46,000 Falcon-512 signatures per second. Peak memory use during processing came in at 2.1 GiB.
On size, the aggregated proofs work out to approximately 42 bytes per signature. The team says that is 16 times smaller than its predecessors.
Verification also gets quicker. Checking an Aerie proof is 10 times faster than verifying each signature individually on a single core.
How it stacks up against earlier work
Aerie is not the first attempt at this problem. The research compares it directly against Orthus, an earlier signature aggregation system, on comparable hardware.
It delivers 1.5 times faster proving, 38 times faster verification, and proofs that are 1.7 times smaller.
The research also says Aerie compares favorably to Ethereum’s leanVM approach in terms of network throughput.
Why signature size became the bottleneck
Most blockchains secure accounts and consensus with elliptic curve cryptography. Schemes like Ed25519 and BLS are compact and fast, which is a big reason they became the default.
The catch is that sufficiently capable quantum computers pose a serious risk to elliptic curve and RSA-based systems. That threat has pushed the industry toward NIST-standardized post-quantum alternatives such as ML-DSA and FN-DSA.
BLS signatures also have a party trick that most post-quantum schemes lack: they aggregate efficiently, letting many validators’ approvals collapse into one.
Falcon sits in an interesting spot. Among the NIST candidates, its signatures are relatively small, but it lacked practical aggregation capabilities until now.
What this means for blockchains planning a quantum migration
LayerZero frames Aerie as a migration path to post-quantum security that does not require specialized hardware.
Running on a consumer laptop’s CPU at sub-second speeds suggests that low-latency post-quantum consensus may be achievable without raising the bar for participation. The researchers present the results as a demonstration of that potential rather than a finished, deployed product.
Roughly 42 bytes per signature after aggregation is a far more manageable figure than the raw sizes that have made post-quantum migration look painful.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.