LayerZero unveils Aerie with 0.65-second quantum-safe signature benchmark

LayerZero Labs has introduced Aerie, a research system that its developers say can aggregate 32,768 quantum-resistant Falcon signatures in 0.65 seconds on an Apple laptop without GPU acceleration. Summary 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures were aggregated in 0.65 seconds using 16 worker threads. Aerie’s standard aggregate includes retained signature data, with a smaller shared-salt version requiring extra conditions. The researchers report faster proof generation than leanVM, while leanVM’s proofs verified faster. NIST lists Falcon as undergoing standardization, separately from its finalized ML-DSA signature standard. LayerZero’s Oct. 16 announcement identifies researchers from its own team, a16z crypto research, Carnegie Mellon University, and Imperial College London as contributors to the project, which builds on the Akita cryptographic proof system. The accompanying paper presents a way to combine thousands of digital signatures into one proof of their validity. Its authors frame the work around a problem facing proof-of-stake blockchains, where validators sign messages confirming the network’s state and other participants must check those signatures. According to the paper, Ethereum ...