Overview
Phase 2 — Planned Research
This section will document the post-quantum cryptography exposure of major cryptocurrency and blockchain networks, the migration mechanisms proposed or under development, and the governance challenges involved in transitioning decentralized protocols to quantum-resistant cryptography.
Unlike enterprise networking, where a vendor can ship a firmware update, cryptocurrency PQC migration requires decentralized consensus across miners, validators, developers, exchanges, and end users. The technical challenge is significant; the social coordination challenge may be greater.
Research Status
This section is a placeholder established to define scope for Phase 2. No individual vendor or platform entries exist yet. Phase 2 research will begin after Phase 1 (networking) is substantially complete.
Planned Coverage
When Phase 2 begins, entries will be created for:
- Bitcoin PQC exposure and BIP proposals
- Ethereum PQC exposure and EIP proposals
- Other major platforms (Solana, Cardano, Monero, others as warranted)
Key Background
Most major blockchain networks rely on ECDSA or EdDSA (Schnorr, Ed25519) for transaction signing — signature schemes vulnerable to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm. The exposure is not uniform: address types that reveal the full public key on-chain are directly vulnerable, while hash-locked addresses that have never been spent only reveal a hash of the public key (requiring a harder preimage attack). The actual distribution of quantum-vulnerable holdings on major networks is an active area of analysis.
NIST-standardized PQC signature schemes (ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, FN-DSA) are candidates for eventual adoption, but their larger signature sizes impose costs at blockchain scale that classical ECDSA does not — every transaction broadcast and stored by every node carries the signature overhead.