LayerZero Labs unveils Aerie for quantum-safe signature aggregation

LayerZero Labs has introduced Aerie, a research system designed to address the size and efficiency challenges of post-quantum digital signatures. Developed in collaboration with a16z crypto research, Carnegie Mellon University, and Imperial College London, the system uses a lattice-based polynomial commitment scheme called Akita to aggregate large batches of Falcon signatures into single, compact proofs.

Post-quantum signatures are typically 10 to 100 times larger than the classical signatures currently used by blockchains, creating significant data bloat. Aerie mitigates this by combining thousands of signatures into one proof. In benchmarks conducted on an Apple M4 Max using only CPU cores, Aerie aggregated 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds and 16,384 Falcon-1024 signatures in 0.63 seconds.

The system achieves a throughput of approximately 46,000 Falcon-512 signatures per second, with aggregated proofs resulting in roughly 42 bytes per signature—approximately 16 times smaller than previous methods. Additionally, verifying an Aerie proof is reported to be 10 times faster than verifying signatures individually on a single core.