ZKNox, a research institution backed by the Ethereum Foundation, said it has reduced the on-chain verification cost of the Falcon quantum-resistant signature scheme from 24 million gas to just 2 million gas, a 12x improvement. The breakthrough brings the cost of using hardware wallets to generate post-quantum secure signatures much closer to that of standard blockchain transactions.
A Major Reduction in Verification Overhead
Speaking at EthCC, ZKNox founder Nicolas Bacca said hardware wallets have long been constrained by the Ethereum Virtual Machine’s limited support for efficient cryptographic signature schemes. That limitation has made advanced signatures, especially post-quantum ones, expensive to verify on-chain and difficult to deploy at scale. The lower verification cost for Falcon is therefore a meaningful step toward practical adoption.
Expanding Hardware Wallet Compatibility
Beyond signature verification, ZKNox is also developing a standardized SDK aimed at improving hardware wallet compatibility with account abstraction. According to the announcement, the work is intended to support features such as social recovery and multi-signature, which could help hardware wallets integrate more naturally into next-generation wallet designs and permission systems.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs on Hardware
The team is also exploring how zero-knowledge proofs could be generated directly on hardware devices, allowing signature validity to be verified on-chain without exposing sensitive information. If successful, that approach could strengthen both privacy and verifiability for hardware-based signing.
In the longer term, ZKNox aims to help establish an open-source hardware security standard and position hardware wallets as universal digital identity signers with quantum-resistant protections. For the Ethereum ecosystem, the work may have implications not only for transaction efficiency, but also for wallet security, identity, and future account architecture.