Insider Brief
- Leaders from nine blockchain organizations have launched the Quantum Alliance, an open standards initiative to define and verify post-quantum readiness across blockchain networks, wallets and infrastructure.
- The Alliance plans to publish open testing criteria, benchmarks and migration guidance covering transaction signatures, key management, consensus, zero-knowledge proofs and peer-to-peer connections.
- Its initial work will focus on four areas: blockchain migration, post-quantum zero-knowledge systems, wallet security and cross-chain compatibility.
PRESS RELEASE — CEOs, CTOs, and founders from nine blockchain organizations today launched the Quantum Alliance, an open standards body that will set the criteria for judging quantum-resistance claims in blockchain and create standards for compatibility between the networks as they migrate. The Alliance will define what post-quantum readiness means for blockchain networks, wallets, and infrastructure, and how to test and verify any claim of quantum resistance.
Nearly every major blockchain secures its accounts with elliptic-curve signatures, and once an account signs a transaction (for some address types, from the moment it is created), its public key sits permanently on a public ledger. A sufficiently capable quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could work backward from that public key to the private key and take control of the funds.
The same signatures protect stablecoin minting keys, governance contracts, bridges, and oracle feeds, so one compromised privileged key could spread across many platforms at once. Almost all of the roughly $2.9 trillion crypto market still relies on classical signatures, with 6.04 million BTC, 30.2% of supply, counted as quantum-exposed at rest.
A growing body of forecasts places the first practical attack around 2028, and several of the most closely watched appeared within the past two years. Since early 2025, the Quantum Doom Clock, a model built by Alliance contributors Richard T. Carback III and Colton Dillion, has pointed to March 2028 as an early window for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
In November 2025, Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist long known for tempering inflated claims about quantum computing, wrote that a fault-tolerant machine running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election had become a live possibility. In March, Google Quantum AI teamed up with researchers from the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford and found that cracking the elliptic-curve cryptography behind Bitcoin, Ether, and most major coins could take fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, roughly a twentieth of earlier estimates.
In April, Aaronson relayed the view of leading hardware experts that a machine able to break deployed cryptosystems could arrive around 2029. He told readers, “This post is your warning,” and urged companies, blockchains, and standards bodies to begin switching to quantum-resistant encryption. In September, IonQ estimated that a fault-tolerant trapped-ion computer with roughly 20,000 physical qubits could solve Bitcoin’s secp256k1 problem in about 26 days per attempt. No existing machine can do this yet.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, but no single party can order a live blockchain to adopt them, and the industry has never agreed on what “quantum-ready” means for a network or how anyone should check it. A May analysis of the qLABS Quantum Vulnerability Index ranked Ethereum second among prepared networks, citing its roadmap and active research.
The migration.fail assessment, a scorecard that counts only cryptography already live, gives Ethereum an F. Each method can be defended on its own terms, and neither gives exchanges, custodians, developers, or asset holders a common reference point. A network can call itself “quantum-resistant” today with no shared understanding of which parts of its system the claim covers or what evidence should support it. The Quantum Alliance was formed to set that bar.
The founding contributors are:
- Christopher Smith, founder and CEO of Quantus.
- Michal “Mehow” Pospieszalski, CEO of American Fortress.
- Leona Hioki of Intmax.
- Aaron Chen, CTO of Keystone.
- Sebastien Guillemot, CTO of Midnight Foundation.
- Colton Dillion, co-founder and CEO of Postquant Labs, developer of Quip Network.
- Dr. Richard T. Carback III, co-founder and CTO of Postquant Labs, and a prominent cryptographer turned quantum algorithms developer.
- Richard Lee, Chief Business Officer of Abelian.
- Bryn Bennett, Chief Revenue Officer at The Vault.
- Katina Messinis, Head of Business Development at Hacken.
Together they span every layer a migration has to pass through: base-layer protocols, privacy networks, rollups, hardware signers, addressing, security auditing, and quantum compute infrastructure.
The Alliance’s first body of work will be a public definition of quantum readiness covering transaction signatures, key management, consensus, zero-knowledge proof systems, and peer-to-peer connections. It will also publish open test criteria and benchmarks that any team can run against its own implementation, along with reference designs for migration that address exposed keys, dormant accounts, and the larger transactions post-quantum signatures produce. Everything the Alliance produces will be published openly, so projects can adopt it directly and anyone can measure a readiness claim against the same yardstick.
“In the future, ‘post-quantum cryptography’ will just be called ‘cryptography’ and everything else will be in a museum,” says Christopher Smith, founder and CEO of Quantus. “Our intention with the Quantum Alliance is to front-load a lot of the complex decision-making when making post-quantum blockchain products and create standards that others can simply pull off the shelf as the industry migrates.”
The work will begin in four groups dedicated to blockchain migration, post-quantum zero-knowledge systems, wallet security, and cross-chain compatibility. Modeled on the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Alliance will be open to individual contributors, and proposals will advance on public evidence, rough consensus, and working implementations. Corporate size and token holdings will carry no voting weight. Developers, researchers, and organizations can join a working group or submit a proposal at URL.
Members of the migration group will study how live networks can move funds and keys to post-quantum schemes, including accounts whose public keys are already exposed and coins whose owners have lost access. StarkWare’s quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction, mined on mainnet in August, illustrates both the progress made and the distance remaining. It protects only coins moved into a special output, cannot help addresses with already exposed public keys, and, by the company’s own account, does not make Bitcoin quantum-safe. The Alliance’s criteria are designed to make the gap between a single working demonstration and network-wide readiness visible to everyone.
A second group will tackle post-quantum zero-knowledge systems, a less visible layer on which privacy networks, rollups, and many cross-chain tools depend. Widely used proof systems built on pairing-friendly elliptic curves carry the same quantum weakness as today’s signatures. Hash-based designs such as zk-STARKs avoid those assumptions but produce larger proofs, leaving teams to weigh size, speed, and security level against one another. The group will define how post-quantum proof systems should be evaluated and benchmarked.
“Zero-knowledge systems carry some of the most sensitive data on any chain, and their security assumptions have to survive the same transition as signatures,” says Sebastien Guillemot, CTO of Midnight Foundation. “Agreeing on how to evaluate post-quantum proof systems now saves every team from solving it alone later.”
Wallet security forms the third track, covering how users and custodians generate, store, and sign with post-quantum keys, from hardware secure elements to recovery flows. This group builds on existing efforts such as Wallet Security for Post-Quantum Ethereum, an initiative co-authored by Dr. Carback and listed with TheDAO Security Fund, which coordinates ecosystem funding for Ethereum security.
“Hardware wallets sit at the point where new cryptography meets real users,” comments Aaron Chen, CTO of Keystone. “Common specifications let device makers support post-quantum keys once and have them work everywhere.”
Cross-chain compatibility completes the program, with interoperability specifications that let wallets, bridges, and hardware signers handle post-quantum keys consistently across chains. The transfer crossing several networks inherits the weakest protection among them, so shared rules at these junctions carry as much weight as upgrades to any single chain.
About members of the Quantum Alliance
- Quantus is a proof-of-work blockchain that uses NIST’s ML-DSA post-quantum signature standard from its first block.
- Postquant Labs develops Quip Network, a decentralized marketplace connecting users with quantum computing hardware.
- Midnight Foundation supports Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain built around zero-knowledge proofs and linked to Cardano.
- Keystone makes open-source, air-gapped hardware wallets that sign transactions through QR codes.
- American Fortress builds Send-to-Name, a system of human-readable private payment addresses with quantum-resistant signing.
- Intmax operates a stateless zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum designed for low-cost, private payments.
- Abelian runs a privacy-focused layer-1 blockchain secured with lattice-based post-quantum cryptography.
- Hacken is a security and assurance partner for financial institutions and the infrastructure providers they rely on.
- The Vault is building PQC custody environments for banks and enterprises that desire to hold digital assets.
