Ethereum allows you to start adding post-quantum protection to your account for as little as $0.07 without waiting for a hard fork, according to Nicolas Consigny, Kohaku project leader at the Ethereum Foundation.
In a Saturday X post, Consigny shared a paper proposing a cheaper way for Ethereum users to protect their accounts from future quantum computing threats. This approach adapts SPHINCS+, a post-quantum signature standard developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to run more efficiently on Ethereum.
The proposal, named “SPHINCS-”, aims to reduce on-chain verification costs without the need for protocol changes or precompilation. Consigny described SPHINCS as a bridge to future post-quantum signature systems, called “leanSPHINCS,” aimed at further reducing verification costs through aggregation.
This proposal aims to address the long-term risk of quantum threats to Ethereum’s elliptic curve digital signature algorithm with a cost-effective solution that can be implemented before a dedicated hard fork is developed.
Lower security and on-chain verification costs due to variants of signature scheme SPHINC. sauce: Ethresearch.ch
Future quantum computing threat shakes up crypto community
In April, post-quantum startup Project Eleven awarded an award to researcher Giancarlo Relli for cracking a 15-bit elliptic curve key using a quantum computer.
The length of a Bitcoin key is 256 bits, which is significantly larger than the 15-bit key that Lelli successfully cracked. He derived the private key from a private key paired with a public key using a variant of Scholl’s algorithm, a quantum computing technique that theoretically poses a threat to the type of encryption used in Bitcoin.
According to Glassnode, approximately 1.92 million Bitcoins, or almost 10% of the total supply, are considered “structurally insecure” in future quantum attack scenarios. Furthermore, 20.6% of the supply, or 4.12 million BTC, is classified as “operationally insecure” due to key or address management practices.
sauce: glass node
The analytics firm estimates that the remaining 69.8% of the supply, or 13.99 million bitcoins, is not threatened by quantum computing, roughly in line with Ark Invest’s March estimate that 65% of the supply was secure.
magazine: Bitcoin vs. Quantum Computer Threat — Timeline and Solutions (2025-2035)
