LayerZero and Coinbase push crypto closer to quantum resistance

In a bid to strengthen blockchains against future quantum computers, LayerZero has shipped a new post-quantum cryptographic building block, and Coinbase is convening Bitcoin developers and cryptographers at Stanford. 

Both efforts are targeted towards the concern that the cryptography securing nearly every major chain will not survive a sufficiently powerful quantum machine.

What does LayerZero’s Akita do? 

Bitcoin and Ethereum currently use elliptic-curve cryptography to protect digital signatures. The problem is that a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could, in theory, figure out a private key from a public key, letting someone steal funds.

The threat became more urgent following the release of a whitepaper in March 2026. In it, Google Quantum AI researchers, namely Ryan Babbush and Hartmut Neven, said that breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography could take fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and around 90 million Toffoli gates— a major reduction from what was thought necessary. 

The threat is not immediate as Google’s current “Willow” quantum chip only has 105 physical qubits, but it is significant regardless. 

Google has decided that by 2029, it will complete its own migration to post-quantum cryptography and has named Coinbase, the Stanford Institute for Blockchain Research, and the Ethereum Foundation as collaborators.

LayerZero has introduced Akita, which it calls the first production-ready tool of its kind that offers quantum-resistant security for zero-knowledge proving systems—the part of a ZK system that commits to a computation and proves it was carried out correctly.

Akita is based on lattice-based cryptography, the same branch of mathematics that NIST has already standardized for post-quantum encryption and signatures. 

Akita’s advantages over other post-quantum systems include that its proof sizes shrink from 200 kilobytes or more to between 65 and 80 kilobytes, its proving runs two to three times faster than its Jolt system, and its memory use is roughly cut in half. 

Akita will first be used inside Jolt, the zero-knowledge virtual machine that LayerZero built with a16z crypto. Jolt is the technology that powers LayerZero’s Zero blockchain.

What moves has Coinbase made to secure the blockchain? 

Coinbase also hosted a Post-Quantum Bitcoin Workshop at Stanford University alongside Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh and Localhost Research. The closed session gathered Bitcoin developers, institutional custodians, and hardware-wallet specialists in order to compare approaches. 

Participants looked at several possible signature schemes, but each came with trade-offs in security, transaction size, hardware performance, and key management, making them unable to agree on a single best option. 

Coinbase said the important thing is to have a solid, well-tested plan rather than worrying about the exact year an attack might happen. 

The company also said any migration will likely happen in steps, matching what it shared in July, when it introduced a post-quantum version of its key-management system called PQ-CoreKMS. Coinbase said its current system already protects about 99.9% of the assets it holds for customers.

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s “Lean Ethereum” roadmap targets 2029 for full post-quantum protection. A February 2026 roadmap from Vitalik Buterin identified the vulnerable areas, including consensus-layer BLS signatures, KZG data-availability commitments, account-level ECDSA signatures, and ZK-proof systems. 

NIST, for its part, anticipates deprecating ECDSA by 2030 and disallowing it by 2035.

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