a16z’s Aerie Takes Aim at Blockchain’s Post-Quantum Signature Bottleneck

TL;DR:

• Unprecedented speed: Aerie managed to aggregate 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in just 0.65 seconds using a laptop CPU (Apple M4 Max).
• Storage efficiency: The signature size is drastically reduced to about 42.1 bytes per aggregated signature (16 times smaller than the originals).
• Lattice-based approach: Unlike the strictly hash-based solutions explored by Ethereum, Aerie uses a lattice-based proving system, allowing for much more efficient algebraic verifications.

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a16z crypto researcher Justin Thaler, alongside a team of co-authors, introduced Aerie. It is a new proving system designed to aggregate large batches of post-quantum digital signatures into a single computational proof. This breakthrough directly addresses one of the biggest technical challenges currently facing Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain networks as they attempt to shield themselves against the future threat of quantum computers.

1/ Today we’re releasing Aerie: fast post-quantum signature aggregation, using lattice-based SNARKs for lattice-based Falcon signatures. On a laptop (CPU only), it aggregates roughly a full Ethereum slot’s worth of signatures (32,768) in 0.65 seconds.

— Justin Thaler (@SuccinctJT) October 16, 2026

The challenge of post-quantum signature aggregation

Proof-of-Stake blockchains, such as Ethereum, rely on validators’ digital signatures to confirm their participation in the network. Currently, Ethereum groups these signatures (known as BLS) into a single consolidated signature per slot, drastically reducing the data load. However, BLS signatures are based on elliptic curve cryptography, which is theoretically vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum computer.

To solve this, the industry is turning its attention to post-quantum signature schemes (such as Falcon). The problem lies in the fact that the size of these signatures is much larger. A Falcon-512 signature occupies about 666 bytes, compared to the 64 bytes of current signatures. If thousands of these signatures were included in the blocks without an effective compression or aggregation method, the bandwidth requirements and costs of operating a node would skyrocket.

Aerie and lattice-based proofs

Aerie combines Falcon signatures with a mathematical proving system that is lattice-based. Thaler explained through an X thread that this contrasts with other current approaches, such as Ethereum’s leanVM, which use purely hash-based systems.

Hash-based signatures require the calculation of hundreds of these mathematical functions to be verified, which is highly costly to process in a zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) system. The Falcon verification process demands fewer calculations of this type, allowing the Aerie verifier to check the algebraic requirements more directly, using a short “salt” appended to each signature.

Results that exceed expectations

According to the published research paper (whose code is already hosted on GitHub with the collaboration of LayerZero Labs), Aerie’s performance is remarkable. In the performance benchmarks:

• For Falcon-512, Aerie measured approximately 42.1 bytes per aggregated signature, exceeding the efficiency target.
• For Falcon-1024 (a variant with stronger parameters), the team managed to aggregate 16,384 signatures in 0.63 seconds, achieving a 29-fold size reduction.

Compared to previous systems, the authors claim that Aerie is about 29 times faster than approaches like Ethereum’s leanVM in certain consensus scenarios, and 1.5 times faster in proving times than Orthus, a prior Falcon signature aggregator.

However, despite its speed, Aerie presents certain design trade-offs. The proving system (prover) must hold all the signatures of a batch in memory simultaneously, reaching a peak of 2.1 GiB for a batch of 32,768 signatures. Furthermore, unlike recursive systems, Aerie proofs currently cannot be merged with each other, which limits their utility in networks where signature collection is distributed across multiple machines asynchronously.

The development of Aerie makes it clear that designing quantum-safe blockchains will require a delicate balance between long-term security, processing speeds, and the operational costs of decentralized infrastructure.