Project Eleven has acquired Riva Labs, a cryptography engineering team that builds post-quantum wallets and signing tools, according to a company statement shared with Unchained on Tuesday. The companies did not disclose the purchase price or any other terms.
Under the deal, Riva’s team and technology will join Project Eleven’s research and product efforts in digital asset custody, blockchain security, and post-quantum cryptography.
What Riva Labs adds
Riva Labs has focused on hash-based signatures, one family of signature schemes built to withstand attacks from quantum machines. It has applied that research to software wallets, hardware signers, and multi-party computation, or MPC, setups on Ethereum and other public blockchains. The team has also worked on account abstraction.
Project Eleven said Riva recently demonstrated post-quantum signing on consumer hardware. The acquisition also includes the intellectual property Riva developed through that work.
In the statement, Project Eleven CEO and co-founder Alex Pruden said, 「Riva Labs is exactly the kind of talent we want at Project Eleven: deeply technical and focused on turning cryptographic research into systems that can actually be deployed.」
He added that the acquisition 「accelerates our ability to lead the transition to post-quantum security across digital assets.」
One migration problem, not several separate ones
Project Eleven framed the purchase as a way to handle the migration to post-quantum security as a single problem rather than addressing signatures, wallets, key management, and protocol infrastructure one by one.
The company also said AI is speeding up both cryptographic research and cryptanalysis, the study of how to break cryptographic systems. It said AI is central to how Riva conducts its own research and engineering work.
Riva Labs co-founder Matteo Vena said the two teams approached the issue from different directions but arrived at many of the same conclusions about what the industry needs.
Vena said, 「Upgrading the public networks the future will run on, without compromising the properties that make them valuable in the first place, is a monumental challenge.」
Why blockchains are weighing post-quantum upgrades
Most blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, use signature schemes to secure wallets today. In theory, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break those schemes, which is why developers are considering upgrades to quantum-resistant alternatives.
Pruden previously told Unchained that he believes a move to post-quantum cryptography would be a larger upgrade than anything blockchains have gone through before.
Project Eleven’s recent work
Project Eleven raised $20 million in a Series A round in January.
The company has worked with the Solana Foundation to run quantum-resistant transactions on a test network. Ripple is also working with the firm on validator testing and early custody prototypes as part of efforts to make the XRP Ledger quantum-resistant.