Ethereum developers advance post-quantum readiness with deposit contract proposal

The Ethereum Foundation’s push to advance post-quantum readiness on the network’s mainnet got a new chapter on August 24 as a contributor presented a draft plan to integrate quantum-safe keys into the contract validators use to join the network. 

The proposal draft, if it scales all the stages through finalization, would set off a process where the network rebuilds and permanently switches off its current signature scheme. 

The urgency to turn draft plans into shipped code on Ethereum mainnet has escalated since advancements such as the March 2026 Google Quantum AI document that slashed the cost of breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography Ethereum uses by about 20 times, per ethereum.org. 

Those machines don’t exist anywhere in the world right now, but Ethereum is already planning for a future where they are, in the same way the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is too. The NIST plans to deprecate ECDSA by 2030 and disallow it by 2035.

What will the Ethereum post-quantum proposed contract change?

The one-line description in the draft proposal filed by Kevaundray Wedderburn, listing Thomas Coratger and Tom Wambsgans as co-authors, in the ethereum/EIPs repository presented a validator deposit contract with variable length, plus a mode to “irreversibly” retire BLS.

… Continue reading the full article at the original source below.