post-quantum

The messaging protocol XMTP founder Shane Mac stated that XMTP will evolve into a self-operating open-source messaging stack, providing private conversations between people and agents, with infrastructure controlled by users, without requiring tokens or wallets. The network hosted by XMTP Labs will shut down in early 2027.Shane Mac mentioned that he founded XMTP five years ago because he believed that private messaging should not be owned by a single company. He recalled that the team envisioned using wallets as cross-application identities, allowing messages to follow identities, and using tokens to pay infrastructure operators, but this path was not realized. XMTP has never issued tokens and will not issue them now. He admitted that it was a wrong decision to persist with a single shared network for a long time, as developers have consistently requested the ability to self-host XMTP. Therefore, it has shifted to self-hosting, allowing developers to use, inspect, modify, and maintain the entire software suite without relying on Labs. Former employees will assist in maintaining the protocol, and Shane Mac himself will continue to be involved.The article introduces that self-hosted XMTP offers quantum-resistant end-to-end encryption, private one-on-one and group chats, encrypted identities, and message authenticity, as well as SDKs for mobile, web, server, and agents. Chief Technology Officer Nick Molnar has simplified the backend to a single Rust binary and integrated attachments, push notifications, handles, and signed webhooks for new messages. Each self-hosted network does not automatically interconnect by default, and agents from different tools must connect to the same backend to share conversations.

LayerZero Labs, in collaboration with the a16z Crypto research team, Carnegie Mellon University, and Imperial College London, has released new research results called Aerie, aimed at enhancing the aggregation efficiency of post-quantum cryptography signatures. According to the introduction, Aerie is built on the previously launched lattice-based polynomial commitment scheme Akita.On a MacBook Pro equipped with the Apple M4 Max chip, using 16 CPU cores without GPU acceleration, it can aggregate 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds, with peak memory usage of approximately 2.1 GiB. LayerZero states that compared to the previous Orthus scheme, Aerie's proof generation speed has improved by about 1.5 times, verification speed has increased by 38 times, and proof size has been reduced by about 1.7 times. Additionally, Aerie supports the aggregation of ML-DSA signatures standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with specific performance data to be announced later. This research aims to provide a technical path for achieving low-latency, post-quantum secure consensus on blockchain without the need for dedicated hardware.

The official NEAR public chain stated on X that cryptographic agility is a fundamental requirement of the blockchain industry, and the upgrade of signature schemes should become routine. NEAR accounts now support post-quantum ML-DSA signature schemes without the need to migrate assets.The NEAR core development team, Near One, is advancing NEP-655. This proposal involves commitment-based implicit accounts derived from the initial state hash, with assets located after that hash, without exposing public keys or key hashes on-chain. The related functionality has currently been launched on the testnet, with the mainnet planned for release in the coming weeks.For developers, the team is designing the NEAR Intents wallet contract to support custom signature extensions, including ML-DSA and hash-based schemes. For chains that cannot currently add post-quantum keys, the team is advancing the Q-day recovery registry on NEAR, allowing users to submit recovery keys in a rotatable hash format. NEAR claims that quantum computing factors were considered in its design back in 2018.

According to CoinDesk, Project Eleven, which focuses on defending against future quantum computing attacks, and the privacy-oriented proof-of-work blockchain Quantus plan to complete integration in the first quarter of 2027. This will connect Quantus to Project Eleven's institutional custody platform Strongpoint, allowing institutions to manage Quantus keys and approve transactions through hardware security modules, internal policies, and audit systems.The significance of this integration goes beyond a single chain. Networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are unlikely to adopt the same post-quantum signature schemes or migration paths. Banks holding multiple assets may need to adapt to various new cryptographic forms simultaneously, without weakening control over transaction approval, signing, and auditing. Alex Pruden, co-founder and CEO of Project Eleven, stated that this transition could become a barrier for institutions adopting cryptocurrencies, as they have already prepared for post-quantum transitions outside of blockchain.Christopher Smith, co-founder and CEO of Quantus, believes that AI is accelerating everything, including quantum hardware and quantum software. The tail risk of sudden quantum attacks must be incorporated into all portfolio decisions, as it falls under fiduciary duty. The design of Strongpoint decouples the institutional control layer from the signature schemes used by the underlying blockchain. Even if different cryptography is adopted on-chain, custodians can still retain approval processes, hardware key storage, and audit trails. Quantus uses the post-quantum signature standard ML-DSA selected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for key generation and transaction signing.

The digital asset post-quantum security infrastructure company Project Eleven announced the acquisition of Riva Labs to enhance its capabilities in post-quantum signatures, wallets, multi-party computation (MPC), and account abstraction. This acquisition also includes the technology and intellectual property developed by Riva on Ethereum and other public chains.Riva Labs' work encompasses hash-based post-quantum signatures, post-quantum MPC, account abstraction, wallet infrastructure, and hardware signing, and has demonstrated post-quantum signatures on consumer-grade hardware. Project Eleven stated that the relevant teams and technologies will be integrated into its research and product work in post-quantum cryptography, digital asset custody, and blockchain security. Riva will also bring its practices of using artificial intelligence in research and engineering processes into the company.Project Eleven's CEO and co-founder Alex Pruden stated that the acquisition will strengthen the research and engineering teams and accelerate the transition of digital assets to post-quantum security. Riva Labs co-founder Matteo Vena mentioned that both parties share a similar judgment on the tools needed in the industry, and joining Project Eleven will allow for a larger-scale advancement of public chain upgrades.

Bitcoin Magazine posted on X that students from East Texas A&M University announced the construction of the first post-quantum secure solution for the Bitcoin Lightning Network.The Lightning Network is a second-layer payment network for Bitcoin, and post-quantum security generally refers to protective designs against potential vulnerabilities in existing cryptography posed by future quantum computing.

Coinbase Chief Cryptographer Yehuda Lindell stated on the MARA Foundation TV program that the exchange is designing a custody system capable of adapting to any post-quantum signature scheme that Bitcoin may adopt in the future. It is currently unclear which post-quantum signature scheme Bitcoin will use in practical applications. Lindell believes it is unlikely that a single signature scheme will be universally adopted, so preparations must be made for different outcomes across various blockchains.Coinbase is custodian for approximately $250 billion in assets for institutions such as BlackRock. Traditional Multi-Party Computation (MPC) relies on key sharding, but many post-quantum signature schemes may be "not friendly to MPC"; for example, hash-based signatures lack the arithmetic structure required for traditional cryptographic key splitting. Although cryptographers like Dan Boneh are researching relevant solutions, this research is still in a highly experimental phase, and it remains uncertain whether a viable MPC-like solution for hash signatures can be developed.To this end, Coinbase is exploring a backup architecture centered around programmable Hardware Security Modules (HSM), where private keys will be encrypted with post-quantum cryptography and assembled only within physically secure HSMs. Lindell stated that while the completion timeline is uncertain, once finished, "I will be able to say, I can support any scheme," without worrying about a blockchain adopting a signature scheme that it cannot support.

According to Cryptopolitan, over 100 researchers, using AI coding agents, have reduced the quantum attack resource score for the Bitcoin secp256k1 elliptic curve point addition subroutine by 86.1% (from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion). This optimization only targets a single step in Shor's algorithm and does not break any private keys or transfer funds; a complete attack still requires fault-tolerant quantum hardware that does not yet exist. However, each efficiency improvement compresses the time window for quantum migration after blockchain completion.According to Glassnode data, approximately 6.04 million BTC (30.2% of the circulating supply) face potential quantum risks due to exposed public keys on-chain. Ethereum plans to achieve full quantum resistance by December 2029, while the Bitcoin community faces greater challenges at the governance level, including how to handle approximately 1.7 million suspected dormant P2PK address coins held by Satoshi, which remains unresolved.

The a16z crypto research team today released a new version of the open-source zkVM Jolt, called Lattice Jolt. This version has the same architecture as the previous version but changes the underlying cryptography from elliptic curves to lattices, while achieving post-quantum security, a 2-3 times speed increase for provers and verifiers, and proof sizes below 100 KB.Lattice Jolt replaces the previous elliptic curve-based Dory with a new polynomial commitment scheme Akita based on the Module-SIS assumption, targeting full 128-bit security. Akita was developed by researchers and engineers from LayerZero in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and the a16z crypto team. On the same machine, Lattice Jolt proofs exceed 2 million RISC-V cycles per second using only the CPU, and over 10 million cycles per second with Apple Metal GPU acceleration, with prover space reduced to about 200 bytes per cycle.

LayerZero announced the launch of Akita, calling it the first production-ready, lattice-based polynomial commitment scheme for post-quantum security.LayerZero stated that this is the first major step to achieve quantum security for Zero and will be implemented on the first day of Jolt's launch, thanks to collaboration with a16z crypto.

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) stated that the Protocol Cluster has released two new articles that systematically assess the upcoming network upgrade Hegotá. Among them, the "Hegotá EIP Opinion Post and Tier List" evaluates and ranks the currently proposed 62 EIPs, marking the first time the team has published a unified EIP rating list for a major network upgrade.It was reported that approximately 60 researchers, engineers, and domain experts from 9 teams under the Protocol Cluster participated in the review, submitting a total of 397 rating opinions and engaging in live discussions on controversial proposals. The accompanying article outlines the current and future key directions of the Ethereum protocol layer, with one core goal being to promote Ethereum L1's quantum resistance by December 2029.The Ethereum Foundation indicated that the aforementioned upgrade plans, long-term commitments, and shared priorities at the cluster level provide the contextual basis for finalizing the scope of the Hegotá upgrade and the EIP ratings. Additionally, the Protocol Cluster will hold an AMA on September 16 at 14:00 UTC in the r/ethereum community on Reddit to discuss topics such as the Hegotá EIP ratings and key protocol developments.

The G7 Cybersecurity Working Group stated in its latest report that quantum computing poses security threats to both public and private institutions, as well as economic threats, and relevant organizations should begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) immediately. The working group noted that the migration process could take several years, and attackers can currently collect and store encrypted data to decrypt it once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available.Quantum computing may also break digital signatures, leading to identity theft and exposing businesses and their supply chains. The report did not mention cryptocurrencies, but similar public key cryptography is used for blockchain wallets and transaction authorizations. Currently, quantum computers are unable to break Bitcoin's cryptography, but developers are considering post-quantum solutions such as BIP-360. Ethereum researchers plan to replace several cryptographic components used by accounts, validators, and applications. The Solana Foundation has tested post-quantum signatures on its testnet and launched an optional hash-based vault. The G7 working group also urged governments to support relevant research, public-private collaboration, and national PQC strategies.

The Ethereum community has released a deposit contract EIP proposal that supports post-quantum computing. The proposal aims to introduce a new contract that supports variable-length public keys and credential metadata, along with a clear scheme identifier, where scheme 0 is reserved for the current BLS deposits.The new contract no longer relies on the Merkle tree structure of the old deposit contract but instead passes deposit information to the consensus layer through execution requests derived from EIP-7685 logs. This contract features an irreversible mode controlled by protocol system calls: deposits are initially disabled, BLS deposits are enabled at a specified timestamp, and BLS deposits are permanently disabled at a later timestamp, with no option for re-enabling. During the migration period, the execution client must merge deposit requests from the new and old contracts.

The open automated research challenge better.codes, created by the Ethereum Foundation's formal verification team in collaboration with Yukon and zkSecurity, is now live. This platform formalizes the self-contained problems from the Proximity Prize in Lean and places the machine-checked reliability bounds of koalaIRS12 on a public leaderboard, allowing anyone to contribute to improvements, advancing hash-based SNARK and post-quantum Ethereum-related security benchmarks.Solvers can bring their own AI agents to prove higher lower bounds of reliability for this Reed-Solomon proximity problem, moving towards a fixed target of 128 bits. The Lean kernel verifies each submission, and the promoted proofs will enhance the public bounds, with new lemmas, proof techniques, and impossibility results being synchronized upstream for reuse by all participants. Most hash SNARKs in production environments rely on related proximity gaps and related conclusion agreements, while the currently provable results remain below the benchmarks trusted by researchers; this challenge aims to narrow this gap in an open, incremental, and verifiable manner.koalaIRS12 originates from related papers and is end-to-end formalized in ArkLib. Participants can log in via GitHub and clone the challenge repository, submitting under fixed theorem statements and verification frameworks; results confirmed by the comparator and Lean kernel are recorded in a public repository, noting the solver and the model used. Today's launch features the reliability challenge that raises the proven lower bound of koalaIRS12 to 128 bits, with more problems potentially added later, subject to project terms.

Justin Drake posted on the X platform that Ethereum L1 will no longer use the SNARK-friendly hash function Poseidon, which has dominated since 2019, and will instead turn to traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s.This adjustment is based on advancements in the field of SNARK design, shifting the focus from "SNARK-friendly hashing" to "hash-friendly SNARK." By aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashing with binary field native, the proof performance of traditional hashing in SNARK has reached 1 million per second, with an overhead of about 100 times.Research from Binius and Flock has driven relevant progress. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this route, with a roadmap that includes deploying production-level leanVM in 2027, and deploying in the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028.Justin Drake also stated that the enhanced capabilities of AI in cryptanalysis have recently led to setbacks for the lattice-based scheme HAWK and the homomorphic scheme SQIsign, with hash-based schemes being used for post-quantum signatures on the blockchain. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating, with SNARK.fast achieving 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.

Vitalik Buterin stated that he has compared the 2023 Ethereum roadmap with the current Strawmap, and while there is still a high degree of overlap in the overall direction, some priorities and technical paths have been clearly adjusted. This includes elevating the priority of quantum security, downplaying VDF and certain EVM improvements, and replacing old designs with unified binary trees, PBT, new state types, and other solutions.He pointed out that the most significant change in the current Strawmap is the emergence of several new topics not included in the 2023 roadmap, reflecting a shift in the focus of Ethereum's development. These new focal points include: stronger native privacy support, aggressive scaling in a post-quantum context, streamlined specifications for formal verification, Blob and Gas futures, native Rollup, and a more open design space around the future form of EVM.Vitalik also emphasized that Ethereum's scaling approach is shifting from "broadly scaling all activities" to "designing more easily scalable dedicated mechanisms for specific high-load scenarios," and views STARK proofs and AI-accelerated formal verification as important foundations for the protocol's future. Overall, this update indicates that the Ethereum roadmap is evolving towards quantum security, privacy-first, censorship resistance, high performance, and more simplified protocol design.

Anthropic announced that the Claude Mythos Preview model has made breakthroughs in cryptographic research, discovering improved attack methods against the post-quantum digital signature candidate HAWK. HAWK is a post-quantum signature candidate solicited by NIST to combat quantum computer attacks, which has already passed two rounds of expert review. However, Claude reduced the effective key strength of HAWK-256 from 2^64 to 2^38 in just 60 hours, significantly lowering the theoretical cost of cracking. HAWK has not yet been deployed in practice, and this attack currently does not affect any production systems.Claude also discovered an improved attack against 7-round AES, achieving a speed increase of 200 to 800 times. During the research process, Claude independently completed literature reviews, mathematical reasoning, and experimental validation with limited guidance from cryptographers. The HAWK attack took about 60 hours and had an API cost of approximately $100,000; the AES attack was completed independently by Claude, which generated about 1 billion tokens before proposing core innovative ideas. Anthropic researchers then spent hundreds of hours validating the results. Anthropic stated that AI models can now help identify significant flaws in cryptographic algorithms, and the cryptography community may face bottlenecks similar to those in the software vulnerability field—AI-generated research results far exceed human verification capabilities. Anthropic has collaborated with academic institutions to launch the CryptanalysisBench benchmark and coordinated disclosures with NIST authors and government partners. The research team has achieved preliminary results on algorithms such as LEA and Serpent-128. Anthropic warns that as AI capabilities improve, actual attacks against deployed systems may be discovered in the future, necessitating the establishment of response mechanisms in advance.

According to the official announcement from NEAR Chain Status, the NEAR mainnet version 2.13.0 has been released, introducing post-quantum transaction signature schemes and dynamic sharding features.Voting will begin at 8:00 AM Beijing time on July 20. Former NEAR core developer Vadim introduced that this upgrade includes features that would typically require a ten-year roadmap for most blockchains: the post-quantum signature ML-DSA-65 becomes the third key type in the protocol after ed25519 and secp256k1, allowing accounts to hold keys that cannot be forged by quantum computers, with only a 32-byte hash recorded on-chain; dynamic sharding enables the chain to automatically monitor the status and size of each shard and to split and re-shard at epoch boundaries without the need for protocol upgrades or manual intervention; Gas Keys provide critical functionality for the proxy economy, allowing a single account to run a batch of proxies to send transactions simultaneously without nonce conflicts.

According to PR Newswire, QIZ Security announced the completion of a $17 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others.The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance, helping large clients in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure achieve "crypto agility" to address the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing capable of breaking existing encryption systems may emerge as early as 2029, and collaborates with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.