Comparative Performance Analysis of NIST-Selected Post-Quantum Signature Schemes for Distributed Ledger Technology

Distributed ledgers must migrate from elliptic-curve signatures to post-quantum alternatives, and the open question is no longer which primitives are available but which ledger resource they exhaust first. This paper identifies the binding constraint of a block-constrained ledger after migration and its margin: whether capacity is limited by transaction payload or by signature-verification throughput. The inputs are measurements of the three NIST-selected families—ML-DSA (FIPS 204), SLH-DSA (FIPS 205), and FN-DSA (FIPS 206, in development)—across all nine parameter sets and three classical baselines on one x86-64 platform under WSL2. Under first-order analytical bounds, payload capacity is the binding constraint for every scheme at the block sizes, intervals, and transaction formats examined, with verification headroom from 124 to 1622 times for the post-quantum configurations. The verification advantage of ML-DSA is parameter-dependent: ML-DSA-44 verifies 1.47 times faster than the ECDSA secp256k1 ledger verifier, whereas ML-DSA-87, mandated by CNSA 2.0, is 1.67 times slower; absolute timings and these ratios may differ on other platforms. Five of the nine configurations are Pareto-optimal within their security level. The FN-DSA results reflect the liboqs 0.16.0 implementation and may change once FIPS 206 is finalized. An interleaved control-probe protocol holds the mean cross-run coefficient of variation to 1.35%.