How prepared is the Ethereum Foundation for the post-quantum era?

Today, March 24, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new public dashboard to track its progress towards making Ethereum quantum-resistant across every layer. 

The dashboard comes as one of the solutions built after a January 24 tweet, where Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake formally declared post-quantum security as a top strategic priority.

In his January tweet, Drake stated that “After years of quiet R&D, EF management has officially declared PQ security a top strategic priority. It’s now 2026, timelines are accelerating. Time to go full PQ.”

From the lab to the roadmap

The Ethereum Foundation’s new site was launched by its post-quantum, cryptography, protocol architecture and protocol coordination teams in a coordinated effort that began as far back as 2018. 

The website provides the full post-quantum roadmap, open repositories, formal specifications, research papers, EIPs, and a 14-question FAQ written directly by the PQ team. It also contains a six-part interview series produced with Knowledge FM. 

So far, over ten teams are already building and shipping devnets through the PQ Interop process. Projects like Lighthouse and Grandine have already implemented PQ devnets, and Prysm is expected to follow suit.

The Ethereum Foundation also runs biweekly developer sessions led by researcher Antonio Sanso on post-quantum transactions. 

Notably, the Ethereum Foundation made some serious financial commitments to get this project done. Last year, the Foundation announced a $1 million Poseidon Prize to improve a hash function key to Ethereum’s zero-knowledge proof systems. This was in addition to the $1 million Proximity Prize targeted around broader post-quantum cryptographic research since last year. 

Additionally, there’s also the zkEVM Formal Verification Project, a $20 million verification initiative led by Alex Hicks that helps ensure every cryptographic component the Foundation builds performs exactly as designed.

What the threat actually is

Ethereum’s security (like most of the internet) depends on mathematics that’s easy to compute in one direction and cannot be reversed currently. 

A private key (like a password) can generate a public key (like a username), but no computer today can work backwards from a public key to recover the private key. However, hypothetically speaking, a powerful enough quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can.

Most engineering roadmaps place cryptographic emergence in the early 2030s, but the Foundation believes that timeline uncertainty is not a reason to wait. Upgrading a global decentralized protocol takes years of coordination and engineering, meaning that the work must start long before the threat comes.

Nonetheless, Ethereum doesn’t share the same risk profile as Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, up to 5% of the supply is associated with early address formats that are mostly abandoned. On the other hand, Ethereum‘s exposure is closer to 0.1%, making the challenge more manageable and not as urgent.

What the Ethereum Foundation still needs to do

Earlier this week, BTQ Technologies launched the first working implementation of Bitcoin’s BIP 360 quantum-resistant proposal on a live testnet. However, while Bitcoin is held back mostly by slow governance processes, Ethereum uses a more structured model with dedicated teams, formal roadmaps etc, giving it a more predictable upgrade trajectory.

Nonetheless, Ethereum still has to prove that it can execute at scale. Migrating hundreds of millions of accounts to quantum-safe authentication without downtime, losses, or creating new attack surfaces is a much different issue than designing the cryptography itself. 

Based on the Foundation’s current assessment, core L1 protocol upgrades could be completed by 2029, with full execution-layer migration coming years later. Whether that assessment will hold depends on how well the governance process, clients, and the broader Ethereum ecosystem collaborate over the next few years.

Ethereum is currently trading around $2,140, down about 0.25% over the last 24 hours, maintaining above the $2,100 level for most of the day.

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