The Ethereum Foundation expects to complete quantum security upgrades by 2029

The Ethereum Foundation released a new roadmap on Tuesday, outlining how the development team is preparing for the threats posed by quantum computing.

The Foundation's quantum team expects a series of preliminary upgrades to the network to be completed by 2029, primarily involving four key hard forks. The Foundation stated that quantum computing will eventually break the public key cryptography that protects ownership, authentication, and consensus in all digital systems, but this threat is not expected to arrive immediately. Researchers from the Foundation's quantum team anticipate that quantum computing with cryptographic capabilities will not emerge for another 8 to 12 years.

Among the four hard forks, the "I" fork will provide network validators with quantum-safe public keys, and the "J" fork will reduce the Gas fees for validating quantum-safe signatures; both upgrades have been included in the considerations for the Hegota fork expected to take place later this year. The "L" fork will express the network state as zero-knowledge proofs, while the "M" fork will protect Layer 2 networks from quantum threats.

Researchers indicated that Layer 1 protocol upgrades could be completed by 2029, while a complete migration of the execution layer will require several additional years thereafter. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated quantum team in January of this year, and a developer testnet began testing some quantum features in March.