BLS Signature
A digital signature scheme that allows thousands of individual signatures to be aggregated into a single compact signature, used in Ethereum's validator consensus.
A BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) signature is a digital signature scheme that allows a very large number of individual signatures to be aggregated into a single compact signature, which is specifically why Ethereum uses it for validator consensus — with tens of thousands of active validators, aggregating their individual attestations into one signature keeps the network's bandwidth and verification costs manageable.
Without signature aggregation, verifying every individual validator's vote on every block would impose a far heavier computational and bandwidth burden on the network than aggregated BLS signatures do.
Examples
- Ethereum's validator set, numbering in the tens of thousands, relies on BLS signature aggregation to keep consensus verification practical.
- BLS signature aggregation combines many individual validator attestations into a single compact signature, rather than requiring each to be verified separately.