Antonio Sanso, a cryptography researcher on the Ethereum Foundation, is confident that the blockchain might be quantum secure long before a quantum attack is even possible.
“We because the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and the Ethereum community are working hard on this issue,” he told Cointelegraph.
“The research part might be the part that's already discovered. And we're starting the execution phase. And we're really confident that we'll meet the schedule and the deadline.”
The EF has made post-quantum security (PQ) a top strategic priority. On January twenty fourth, the formation of a post-quantum team led by Thomas Coratger was announced. Sanso is leading its latest bi-weekly All Core Devs calls on post-quantum security starting February 4th.
It's a large undertaking. He explained that Ethereum's execution, consensus and data availability layers all should be updated.
“When we speak about a post-quantum solution, we’re not talking about one part – there are all the various large macro areas of Ethereum that should be migrated,” he said.
“The good thing is that we now have been working on this for a lot of months, if not years. So we now have a transparent plan in mind and we are going to probably implement it in the following few years.”
One fifth of the strategy to the finish line
Asked how far the work has progressed to date, Sanso said solutions for the various layers are progressing at different rates, “so there's not a percentage for all three. But we're around 20%.”
The latest bi-weekly call discusses the advantages and trade-offs of various approaches. Multi-client post-quantum development networks are actually live, and a PQ roadmap might be released soon, aiming for what EF researcher Justin Drake calls “a full transition in the approaching years with no lack of funds and no downtime.”
Ethereum’s quantum stability is only one a part of an entire overhaul of the whole blockchain as a part of Lean Ethereum. The goal is to make Ethereum faster, simpler and more decentralized using zero-knowledge technology (ZK), while making it proof against quantum attacks.
Comparison with Bitcoin
The enthusiasm for Ethereum's quantum security stands in stark contrast to Bitcoin, where executives from Adam Back to Michael Saylor have downplayed the necessity for change, pointing to estimates that suggest a quantum computer could possibly be a few years or many years away.
Post-Quantum Vitalik Buterin at DevConnect. Source: Screenshot
That's true, but with reservations. At DevConnect in Buenos Aires, co-founder Vitalik Buterin identified that the typical prediction that a quantum computer will break cryptography is in 2040, however the probability that this might occur by 2030 remains to be 20%.
However, less Bitcoin (BTC) is definitely vulnerable to quantum attacks. Estimates suggest that around 6 million BTC, mostly in older addresses with exposed public keys, are currently in danger.
“From a technical perspective, the migration is less complicated,” explained Sanso. “But they’ll probably have an issue on a human level… finding agreement on what to do.”
“Ethereum, we don’t have this problem, but … technologically we want to migrate more things,” he said. “We share the identical proven fact that we want to alter the signatures of execution transactions, but of the issues we now have – between execution layer, consensus and data availability – the execution layer is the only. So the opposite two are a bit of more complicated.”
What happens if quantum computers arrive sooner?
Sanso's own estimate for the quantum computing deadline is the mid-2030s. He expects Lean Ethereum to be accomplished sometime between 2028 and 2032.
Considering how suddenly large language models and ZK proofs arrived (within the latter case, well ahead of estimates), it is feasible that quantum computers will find a way to crack blockchains before they’re fully ready.
You can now increase the protection of your Ether (ETH) by sending it to a brand new, unused address because the public keys are usually not exposed (quantum computers work backwards to derive the private keys from the general public ones using Shor's algorithm).
In the long run, smart wallets that use a mix of account abstraction and post-quantum signatures will protect your ETH.
“The idea is to have a brand new post-quantum algorithm, probably grid or hash based. And principally we are going to integrate it with account abstraction.”
PQ signatures are much larger
At DevConnect in November, Zknox introduced a hardware wallet with a post-quantum dilithium signature that’s compatible with Ethereum's existing infrastructure.
Source: Zknox
However, post-quantum signatures are massive and the lightest, called Falcon, remains to be ten times larger than the present ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) signatures.
Sanso explained that coding the grid solution in Solidity costs a fortune in gas. There is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) for precompilation to do that mechanically outside of the core protocol, which might speed things up and reduce costs.
The broader problem of integrating signatures ten times larger than current ones onto the chain will likely require plenty of different measures, including the usage of ZK-STARKs to scale back the scale.
Emergency quantum upgrade
But Buterin also developed a contingency plan in March 2024 to take care of a quantum attack, which incorporates a tough fork and a way for ETH holders to prove that they’re the rightful owners of a specific address before switching to PQ addresses with the corresponding balance.
Sanso said this plan has moved forward and so they are working on a way for ETH holders to make use of ZK proofs to securely prove that they’ve the proper seed for an address.
“We have been actively working on this. Hopefully it can be a project that showcases this, either at EthCC Cannes or at Devcon in India.”
Depending on which EIPs are approved, this method is also used as a part of the planned switch to PQ signatures. Individuals would find a way to prove ownership of an address and would then find a way to change off the present quantum-vulnerable ECDSA portion of an account.
“We have this EIP you can activate yourself and say, I'm going to delete the elliptic curve part on my EOAs. So you retain the identical address, and the one way so that you can remove things out of your address is thru a mix of account abstraction and that seed proof.”
“It will probably be discussed in the following forks, and if you happen to ask me, I believe it's getting into the proper direction.”
Sanso noted that deciding which EIPs to incorporate might be an extended process and can ultimately be decided by the community.
He said the primary All Core Devs PQ “Breakout Room” call is scheduled for February 4, 2026.
According to Drake, the bi-weekly sessions will “concentrate on user-centric security and canopy dedicated precompiles, account abstraction, and longer-term transaction signature aggregation using LeanVM.”
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