LayerZero’s Aerie tackles the post-quantum signature bloat problem

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 ...