OP Labs has released a post-quantum security roadmap for the Superchain, committing to phase out ECDSA-based externally owned accounts, or EOAs, by January 2036. Under the plan, OP Mainnet and the wider Superchain will spend the next 10 years moving away from ECDSA-signed EOA transactions, with users expected to delegate key management to post-quantum smart contract accounts. The proposal still requires governance approval.
The company framed the timeline as a preparation measure. Large-scale quantum computers do not exist today, but OP Labs said the cryptographic foundations used across Ethereum and the Superchain would face serious risks if that changes before the ecosystem is ready. Signatures and commitments sit at the base of the system; if those primitives fail, the layers built on top of them would be exposed as well.
User migration centers on EIP-7702 and account abstraction
For wallets and end users, the migration path runs through account abstraction. Because the OP Stack supports EIP-7702, an EOA can delegate its authority to a smart contract account, allowing key management to be upgraded without forcing users to abandon existing addresses or balances. In practice, that opens a route from traditional ECDSA signing toward smart wallets capable of validating post-quantum signatures.
OP Labs said the coming decade will be used to move EOAs through EIP-7702 or later account abstraction standards. Once the deadline arrives, OP Stack chains are expected to deprecate raw ECDSA-signed EOA transactions at the protocol level. The team also made clear that the final post-quantum signature choice has not been made, and that it remains uncertain whether NIST-standardized lattice-based signatures will be the best long-term fit for Ethereum and the Superchain.
Users are not being asked to act now. The announcement is meant to set expectations early so wallet teams, app developers, infrastructure providers, and OP Stack chains can plan around a fixed timeline.
Sequencers and batch submitters are also in scope
OP Labs is treating post-quantum security as a stack-wide transition rather than a wallet-only change. According to the roadmap, L2 sequencers and batch submitters will also move from ECDSA signatures to post-quantum signatures, and OP Stack chains across the Superchain will share a common roadmap so the shift happens in a coordinated way.
That point matters because wallet migration alone would leave a gap if core chain infrastructure kept relying on older cryptographic assumptions. OP Labs is placing the infrastructure layer on the same track as user accounts.
Ethereum upgrades are part of the long-term picture
On Ethereum itself, OP Labs said the network currently depends heavily on BLS signatures for validators and KZG commitments for data availability and blobs. Its position is that Ethereum should eventually commit to a schedule for moving validators away from BLS signatures and KZG commitments toward post-quantum algorithms.
OP Labs said it has already been in contact with members of the Ethereum Foundation on this topic and related efforts tied to post-quantum security for Ethereum and, by extension, the Superchain. The final scheme and timeline will be decided by the community, but the company said post-quantum protection at the consensus layer should not be treated as optional.
Hard forks, not emergency rewrites
As for implementation, OP Labs said the OP Stack architecture is already designed in a way that allows signature schemes to be replaced through hard forks. Once the ecosystem agrees on a preferred post-quantum approach, the next steps would include writing upgrade specifications for wallet models, sequencer keys, and on-chain verification rules, then coordinating hard forks across OP Mainnet and participating OP Stack chains.
During the migration window, both ECDSA and post-quantum paths are expected to run in parallel. At the end of the 10-year period, the standard path would shift fully to post-quantum-aware smart accounts. OP Labs presented the rollout as a long-horizon transition with time for the ecosystem to adapt, rather than a sudden cutover.