Ethereum is moving away from Poseidon at Layer 1, ending years of work around a hash function long favored in SNARK-based systems. On Aug. 13, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said on X that the Ethereum Foundation had decided to abandon Poseidon in favor of traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2. The change comes after eight years of research, tens of millions of dollars in spending, and a broader reset of Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap. The key technical driver is progress in binary-field SNARK design, which allows traditional hash functions to perform inside proving systems at speeds that were previously associated with SNARK-optimized designs. Drake said a laptop can now verify about 1 million conventional hash calls per second in a SNARK setting, while recent benchmarks from projects including Flock and SNARK.fast point to sharply improved throughput. The roadmap itself remains in place. Ethereum still expects a production-grade leanVM in 2027, followed by deployments across the consensus, execution, and data layers in 2028. The Foundation has also expanded its post-quantum work through pq.ethereum.org, weekly interoperability devnets involving more than 10 client teams, and two $1 million research prizes. The shift also comes as Solana and Starknet advance their own post-quantum plans using Falcon and BLAKE2-based transitions.

Mysten Labs co-founder and chief cryptographer Kostas Chalkias said he has leased a factory to mass-produce a quantum-resistant hardware wallet card for Sui called the Quantum 2FA Sui card. He said the target price is below $10 per card, while NFC-based quantum signatures are expected to take 1 to 2 seconds. Chalkias added that he has been pushing the project forward in his spare time and may even subsidize cards for users who cannot afford them. The wallet effort builds on work already underway at the Sui protocol layer. Sui had previously planned to add two NIST-approved post-quantum signature schemes, one for everyday accounts and another for high-value Move-based vaults. Existing Sui accounts would be able to rotate to quantum-resistant keys using current recovery phrases, without moving funds to a new wallet.

Kostas Chalkias, co-founder and chief cryptographer of Sui developer Mysten Labs, has leased a specialized factory in a secret location to mass-produce quantum-safe hardware wallet cards for the Sui network. The goal is a per-card key cost of less than $10, with NFC quantum signing taking one to two seconds. Chalkias said he is pursuing the project in his personal time and may subsidize cards for users who cannot afford them. The move comes partly in response to the Coldcard hardware wallet event, where Coinkite disclosed a firmware flaw dating back to a 2021 update that bypassed the hardware RNG and generated keys via a predictable process tied to device serial numbers. Attackers have drained roughly 2,055 BTC, or about $130 million, from more than 7,700 addresses since July 30. Separately, Sui plans to adopt two NIST-approved quantum-resistant signature schemes - one for everyday accounts and one for high-value Move vaults - allowing existing users to rotate to quantum-safe keys from their original recovery phrase without migrating to a new wallet. The story was first reported by Bitcoin.com News.

Starknet has completed a test transfer on mainnet using a quantum-resistant signature mechanism. A wallet account employing the scheme carried out a real transaction with fees of around $0.06, and the transfer can be verified on a block explorer. StarkWare said the account remains experimental and unaudited, intended mainly for research. The milestone was made possible by Starknet's account model, which treats each account as a smart contract. Unlike chains that hard-code signature algorithms at the protocol layer, Starknet accounts can define their own accepted signature schemes. That allows users to upgrade from traditional elliptic curve signatures to quantum-resistant ones without a hard fork, asset migration, or address changes. StarkWare also warned that most blockchains are exposed to quantum computing risks because both wallet signatures and underlying verification rely on elliptic curve cryptography. If a large-scale quantum computer appears, Shor's algorithm could break those systems. Starknet's ecosystem now supports quantum-resistant signatures based on Falcon-512, a scheme within NIST's post-quantum cryptography standardization efforts, with implementations driven by ecosystem teams and OpenZeppelin.

A busy news cycle from Aug. 6 to Aug. 7 brought a mix of crypto regulation, market structure, corporate disclosures, and AI-linked developments. Dow Protocol said claims that OKX Ventures had invested in the project were false and said a list of investors would be released this week without OKX Ventures on it. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, decided to delay a vote on the Clarity Act until September, extending uncertainty around a major federal crypto bill. Outside Washington, Thailand confirmed a five-year capital gains tax exemption on crypto trades executed through Thai SEC-licensed venues from Jan. 1, 2025 through Dec. 31, 2029. MetaMask introduced a self-custodial AI wallet that lets agents execute on-chain transactions within user-defined limits, and Wintermute registered a broker-dealer subsidiary with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. The update set also included Binance Alpha’s AGT and AIA blind box airdrop, Cipher Digital’s sale of 1,619 BTC at a realized loss, a Chainalysis report on more than $30 million in violent robbery losses targeting crypto holders in the first half of 2026, Bernstein’s renewed $140 target on Circle, and several funding, hardware, and security stories tied to the broader AI sector.

Sui announced plans to bring quantum-safe vaults to its mainnet within this year, introducing two NIST-approved post-quantum signature schemes. ML-DSA-65 will serve as the native protocol signature for regular accounts, while the hash-based SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s is designated for high-value vaults within Move smart contracts. The move responds to the potential threat quantum computing poses to existing elliptic curve cryptography. According to Sui, because Sui keys are deterministically derived from seeds, users can upgrade to quantum-safe keys using their existing recovery mnemonic. An already live address-alias feature lets current accounts update authorization keys without moving assets. The quantum-safe vaults are slated for mainnet deployment this year, with native ML-DSA-65 accounts expected on testnet by year-end. Account authentication is targeted for mainnet in Q1 2027. Sui said the upgrade is incremental and optional, leaving existing accounts and contracts unaffected.

A public challenge from BitGo CEO Mike Belshe has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether artificial intelligence can actually break the cryptographic foundations behind Bitcoin. On Aug. 1, Belshe transferred 100 BTC, worth about $6.5 million at early-August prices, into a BitGo wallet address and openly challenged Anthropic to take it, after a wave of discussion around Claude’s security research and the Coldcard weak-randomness incident. When GoPlusZH checked the chain while writing, the funds were still sitting untouched. The article argues that AI is changing cybersecurity fast, but mostly by improving vulnerability discovery, exploit development, and analysis of weaker or insufficiently reviewed designs. It points to Anthropic’s incident report on Claude’s cybersecurity evaluations, as well as research showing progress against the post-quantum candidate HAWK and reduced-round AES. At the same time, it draws a sharp distinction between those results and the mature cryptographic stack used by Bitcoin, including SHA-256 and secp256k1. GoPlusZH’s main point is that real-world crypto losses rarely come from “breaking encryption” in the abstract. They usually come from implementation flaws, poor key management, phishing, social engineering, or supply-chain compromise. In that framing, AI looks less like a force that overturns mathematics and more like a powerful amplifier of existing operational and security weaknesses.

A new survey from the Global Risk Institute puts the odds of a quantum computer breaking today’s encryption at 28% to 49% within 10 years, rising to 51% to 70% within 15 years. Speaking at the 11th WHATs NEXT Quantum Technology Summit, XREX co-founder and group CEO Wayne Huang said that risk is more acute for the broader financial system than for cryptocurrencies. His argument was straightforward: banks and other regulated institutions can migrate on a regulator-led timetable, while Bitcoin has no central authority that can order a network-wide upgrade. Huang said the core problem is not simply whether quantum machines can break current cryptography today, but how long a full migration would take once institutions decide to move. In banking, that means reviewing account authentication, transaction signing, data transmission, and integrations with outside vendors, then testing and switching systems in phases. The article also points to “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” attacks, in which encrypted data is collected now and cracked once quantum capabilities mature. The report also notes that Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission issued a reference guide for post-quantum cryptography migration in June 2026, while the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has already released post-quantum cryptography standards. Huang said Bitcoin faces a different hurdle: any quantum-resistance upgrade would depend on community consensus among miners, nodes, developers, exchanges, and users.