Post-Quantum

U.S. Departme

2026-09-10 00:24:35

U.S. Commerce Department plans up to $100 million each for three quantum computing firms

The U.S. Department of Commerce will provide up to $100 million each to Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantinuum under the CHIPS Act, for a combined total of as much as $300 million, according to Odaily. The department will also take minority stakes in all three companies. The funding is intended to support research and development tied to fault-tolerant quantum computers, including hardware, manufacturing, and error-correction systems. The update also carries implications for the crypto sector’s longer-term security planning. Ethereum has set December 2029 as its deadline for making the execution layer, consensus layer, and data layer quantum resistant. On the Bitcoin side, developers are advancing two post-quantum signature migration proposals, BIP-360 and BIP-361. Industry participants believe a workable migration path needs to be in place before 2029. Together, those timelines show that quantum-readiness is being treated as a concrete engineering target across both computing and blockchain infrastructure.

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a16z crypto

2026-09-09 15:40:12

a16z crypto releases open-source post-quantum zkVM Lattice Jolt

a16z crypto said on Sept. 9 that it has released Lattice Jolt, a new open-source version of its zero-knowledge virtual machine that shifts its cryptographic foundation from elliptic curves to lattice cryptography. The change gives the system post-quantum resistance and, according to a16z crypto, improves prover and verifier speeds by 2x to 3x. The team also said proof sizes are now below 100KB, which it described as the smallest among post-quantum zkVMs. Lattice Jolt uses a new polynomial commitment scheme called Akita, built on the Module-SIS hard lattice assumption with a target security level of 128 bits. Akita was led by LayerZero’s research and engineering team in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and a16z crypto. On performance, the project said the system can prove more than 2 million RISC-V cycles per second on CPU on the same device, and more than 10 million cycles on a MacBook with GPU acceleration through Apple Metal. Memory use for the prover was reduced from about 300 bytes per cycle to 200 bytes per cycle, enabling proofs for millions of computation cycles on phones.

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Ethereum

2026-09-09 09:05:57

Ethereum sets a 2029 deadline for quantum readiness, with Hegotá as the first critical test

Ethereum Foundation protocol researchers have put December 2029 on the calendar as the target for full post-quantum readiness across Ethereum’s execution, consensus, and data layers, using a conservative planning assumption that a realistic "Q-day" could arrive as early as 2030. The first major checkpoint is not a post-quantum fork itself, but Hegotá, a precursor upgrade that will determine whether the later roadmap can stay on schedule. Under the current baseline, Glamsterdam is aimed at mainnet in December 2026, followed by Hegotá and then I*, J*, K*, and L* over a compressed three-year stretch. Of Hegotá’s 62 candidate proposals, only two are ranked S-tier: EIP-7805 FOCIL, which adds validator-enforced inclusion constraints for eligible transactions, and EIP-8141 Frame Transactions, which introduces more programmable transaction validation, execution, and gas payment at the protocol level. A set of A-tier proposals would also shape account security, migration away from older cryptographic assumptions, execution proofs, and resource pricing. The broader point is timing: Hegotá is being treated as the first engineering exam in Ethereum’s race to prepare for a quantum threat that may still be years away, but cannot be addressed at the last minute.

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Ethereum

2026-09-08 08:27:43

Ethereum sets two headline upgrades for Hegotá as gas sponsorship and censorship resistance take center stage

Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Hegotá, now has two clear top-priority items after the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team reviewed 62 candidate Ethereum Improvement Proposals with roughly 60 researchers and engineers. The winners were FOCIL (EIP-7805), aimed at strengthening censorship resistance at the consensus layer, and Frame Transactions (EIP-8141), which would bring native account abstraction to the execution layer. FOCIL is designed to reduce the power of any single block builder by letting a selected group of validators create inclusion lists of valid mempool transactions that builders or proposers are expected to include. Frame Transactions would split validation, gas payment and execution into programmable components, opening the door for third-party paymasters to cover gas and for users to transact without holding ETH in advance. The Ethereum Foundation also attached a concrete post-quantum target to its roadmap for the first time, setting December 2029 as the point by which Ethereum L1 should become quantum-resistant across the execution, consensus and data layers. Hegotá is not being framed as the post-quantum hard fork itself, but as the first crucial milestone that determines whether the wider roadmap can arrive on schedule.

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QuFi Network

2026-09-04 17:24:45

QuFi Network Launches Post-Quantum Verification Platform, Completes Proof of Concept on Bitcoin Testnet

QuFi Network has launched a post-quantum verification platform and completed a proof of concept on the Bitcoin testnet. The platform separates verification from settlement, aiming to cost-effectively address the security threat of quantum computing to crypto assets.

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Blockstream

2026-08-28 10:31:35

Blockstream researchers publish SHRINCS draft, a post-quantum Bitcoin signature aimed at limiting block-space costs

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.

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Bitcoin

2026-08-27 08:40:25

Justin Sun says Bitcoin may take longer to reach post-quantum consensus, while TRON targets year-end upgrade

Justin Sun said on Aug. 27 at the Bitcoin Asia 2026 conference in Hong Kong that quantum computing poses a broad threat not only to blockchain networks but to the wider financial system as well. He said traditional banks, including JPMorgan, face similar risks. Sun argued that Bitcoin may need more time to reach consensus on post-quantum changes because its community is highly decentralized and involves multiple stakeholders, including miners, exchanges and WBTC-related participants. He also said TRON has been working on post-quantum mechanisms over the past year, released a post-quantum address solution in the first half of this year, and launched it on testnet. According to Sun, TRON plans to upgrade the entire network by the end of this year into a mainstream crypto network with post-quantum capabilities.

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Blockstream

2026-08-27 02:37:07

Blockstream files Bitcoin upgrade proposal for SHRINCS, estimates throughput at about 3 TPS

Blockstream has submitted a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal laying out a specific upgrade path for its post-quantum signature scheme, SHRINCS. The company said SHRINCS has already been tested in production on Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain. Its smallest signature size is 548 bytes, roughly nine times larger than Bitcoin’s current 64-byte Schnorr signature, though still smaller than alternatives such as SPHINCS+, which has been approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. According to Blockstream’s research, Bitcoin throughput would remain around 3 transactions per second if SHRINCS were adopted, a level it described as close to the network’s current performance. By comparison, using NIST-approved schemes could cut throughput to between 0.36 and 0.5 TPS. The proposal centers on how Bitcoin could approach a post-quantum signature transition while limiting the hit to network capacity.

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