Blockstream Research has published a full review of lattice-based signature schemes for Bitcoin, comparing Dilithium, Falcon, and Hawk as post-quantum replacements for Schnorr and ECDSA. The report starts from a practical concern: Shor’s 1994 result showed that sufficiently powerful quantum computers could break today’s elliptic-curve signatures, so Bitcoin needs a deployment path before that threat becomes real. The study ranks candidates across four criteria that matter specifically to Bitcoin: on-chain cost, implementation complexity, deployment risk, and long-term development potential such as BIP-32-style key derivation. It argues that Bitcoin should target at least NIST security level 3 because outputs may remain unspent for decades. In that framework, Dilithium stands out for simple integer-only implementation and the strongest basis for future key derivation work, but its signatures are large. Hawk had looked attractive on size and memory use, yet a newly disclosed structural attack weakened confidence enough for the team behind it to withdraw the scheme from the NIST process. That leaves Falcon as the most balanced option in the report’s view. Its signatures are compact, verification is the fastest among the three, and its security assumptions are more established. Falcon still has unresolved issues, including floating-point complexity in signing, no practical key derivation method, and a standard that has not yet been finalized. Even so, the report says Falcon-1024 would be the preferred lattice-based choice today, while hash-based signatures remain the more conservative near-term path for Bitcoin.

Blockstream researchers on Thursday released a draft specification for SHRINCS, a post-quantum signature scheme built specifically for Bitcoin. The proposal is designed to hold up against quantum computers without causing the steep transaction-capacity drop that has weighed on many post-quantum migration plans. Built on SHA-256, which already sits inside Bitcoin’s consensus rules and mining system, SHRINCS combines a compact stateful signing path with a stateless fallback in case a wallet loses track of signing state. The draft says the public key is 48 bytes, the smallest stateful signature is 548 bytes and grows by about 16 bytes each time a key is reused, while the stateless fallback is 5,776 bytes. Blockstream previously estimated Bitcoin could process about 6.5 transactions per second if all transactions used Schnorr signatures, versus roughly 0.36 under NIST-standardized SLH-DSA. SHRINCS, it said, gets that figure back to close to three. The specification also warns about wallet state management and compatibility risks tied to hypertree pruning. A formal security proof is still pending, and the reference software has not been audited or prepared for production use. Bringing SHRINCS to Bitcoin would require a soft fork and broad network support.

In a flash update on Aug 28, BlockBeats detailed the architectural changes behind Tencent's Hunyuan Hy4 preview. The model is bigger, but the bigger story is under the hood. Hy3 used full attention; Hy4 moves to Gated DSA, a gated form of DeepSeek Sparse Attention. On long inputs, instead of recomputing the entire context, the model selects the most relevant parts and focuses compute there. In Hy3 every layer had to decide what mattered; Hy4 layers Zhipu's IndexCache on top of DSA, so some layers can reuse earlier selections and cut repeated work. Tencent credits DeepSeek and GLM as inspirations. Residual structure also gets a rethink: a standard Transformer is often described as having a single information trunk, while Hy4's iHC widens that to four trunks so the network can retain more information at depth. MoE configuration moves from Hy3's 192 experts to 256 routing experts plus one shared expert, with each token choosing 8 routing experts while always passing through the shared expert.

Blockstream Research has published a detailed review of post-quantum lattice signatures for Bitcoin, comparing Dilithium, Falcon and Hawk across on-chain footprint, verification cost, implementation difficulty, deployment risk and long-term usability. The report starts from a practical premise: Bitcoin’s current Schnorr and ECDSA signatures are efficient today, but Shor’s 1994 result means a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break them, so migration planning cannot wait until the threat is immediate. The study argues that Bitcoin should target at least NIST security level 3 because coins can remain unspent for decades, leaving funds exposed if future cryptanalysis weakens lower-margin parameters. On that basis, Dilithium stands out for simple integer-only implementation and broad software support, but its size is a major drawback on-chain. Falcon offers much smaller signatures and the fastest verification, though its signing path is harder to implement safely because of floating-point Gaussian sampling. Blockstream says deterministic, integer-simulated Falcon can address that issue at the cost of slower signing. Hawk, once notable for very small signatures and low memory use, has dropped out after Straznickas and Weis of Anthropic found a structural flaw that sharply reduced its estimated security. Blockstream’s bottom line is that if a lattice-based option had to be chosen today, Falcon-1024 would be the pick. Even so, the report says the conservative short-term path for Bitcoin is still hash-based signatures until the FN-DSA standard is finalized and production-grade implementations and hardware support mature.

A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for the post-quantum signature scheme SHRINCS has been published, putting a concrete Bitcoin-focused option into the debate over how the network could defend itself against future quantum attacks. The proposal comes from research led by Blockstream, whose team has already tested SHRINCS in production on the Liquid sidechain. Blockstream Research’s Jonas Nick described it as the first concrete post-quantum signature proposal designed specifically for Bitcoin, while also stressing that it is not meant to be Bitcoin’s final signature system and is not optimal in every respect. The core appeal is size. Existing post-quantum schemes endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are far larger than Bitcoin’s current ECDSA and Schnorr signatures, creating a major throughput problem if deployed directly on-chain. SHRINCS is still much bigger than Schnorr, but materially smaller than many alternatives, and Blockstream’s estimates suggest Bitcoin could still run at roughly 3 transactions per second under SHRINCS, versus 0.5 TPS for ML-DSA and 0.36 TPS for SPHINCS+. The catch is that SHRINCS is still early. Its BIP says the security proof remains unfinished, and the design introduces statefulness, signature growth over time, and a large fallback recovery path if a signing device is lost. Blockstream is also exploring lattice-based signatures and zero-knowledge proof aggregation, which it estimates could lift Bitcoin throughput to 6.7 TPS if combined with SHRINCS.

Monad has released a draft improvement proposal aimed at changing how wallet accounts handle authentication and key management. The proposal would separate account authentication from addresses, allowing users to rotate private keys without changing their address. It also includes native support for post-quantum cryptography standards such as ML-DSA. Under the draft, key configuration would be managed through an AuthConfigManager precompile contract. Any change would require proof of ownership and would only take effect after a delay of three blocks. Monad said older accounts could upgrade without disruption while maintaining backward compatibility. The proposal also adds support for multi-factor authentication and social recovery. Techub cited CryptoBriefing in its report on the draft.

Blockstream said a widely cited concern in the crypto industry — that existing hardware wallets are too constrained to support post-quantum cryptography — does not hold up, at least for hash-based signature schemes. According to the company, its research team tested five hash-based schemes across four mainstream hardware wallets: Jade, Trezor, Ledger and BitBox02. All tested devices were able to generate signatures. The results varied by scheme. SLH-DSA took about 53 to 120 seconds per signature, while SPHINCS+ at the 2^40 setting was slightly faster. UXMSS using SHRINCS-B finished in 22 to 42 seconds. UXMSS with SHRINCS-L took much longer at 226 to 573 seconds because of the overgrinding technique, though that fell to just over 3 seconds with the feature disabled. XMSS needed 58 to 118 seconds in cold-start mode, but Blockstream said caching can significantly improve performance. The team added that the test only covered hash-based signature generation. It did not include firmware verification or other post-quantum approaches such as lattice-based or isogeny-based cryptography. Those engineering questions, including cache optimization, are set to be explored in later research.

Responsible Fintech Institute and crypto custody infrastructure provider Safeheron have launched a pilot for quantum-resistant digital asset wallets and onchain transfers, with participants drawn from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The pilot runs on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet and uses a multi-party computation protocol that supports the ML-DSA-65 standard. Participating regulators include Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office, and Malta’s Financial Services Authority, while Bison Bank and DK Bank are involved as financial institutions. Under the setup, banks will test wallet creation and transfers in a shared application environment. Regulators will observe in the first phase before taking part in governance workflows later. The organizers said they plan to publish a white paper covering the research, protocol design, and test results, and will gradually open-source the underlying technology. Cointelegraph also noted that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority aims to have Hong Kong’s banking sector fully prepared for quantum security risks by 2030, while a 2025 report from the Bank for International Settlements recommended that financial institutions migrate to post-quantum systems in phases.