Post-Quantum Security & Ethereum's 2026 Roadmap

Transcript

Introduction & Talk Overview

Okay, that works. So it's um of some of you may have may have came here with idea that you hear about a term vision and direction. So just just in case because I was told before uh that that I'll talk about poson to money. So that's what I prepared for. Uh but I quickly prepared slides for the other one. So maybe you will rush for both. I think I have 20 25 minutes. So it it depends. How many of you like really really want to see it foundation vision and direction topic one? Oh. Oh. Okay. Yeah. So we'll rush that one and that one will be probably like 3 minutes and then I'll go to post quantum money. Um that's a simple vision. Okay. But uh

technically it's challenging. All right. So this is a summary of 2025. Uh since mostly various various events and ideas since I joined uh around March last year. Uh so what we've done mostly at the foundation like the summary of 2025 is uh we we had the comm's team doing amazing job on the improvements of the social media communication storytelling uh both talking about very technical things important things about enterprises institutions and so on but also finally finding uh a new voice for talking to new generation about exciting

Ethereum Foundation 2025 Year in Review

things and that attracts uh a lot of fresh new talent to the EF to the Ethereum ecosystem and generally creates a vibe of things are cool and I think if Boulder if Boulder also contributes to to the feeling that uh that if is cool again and uh then institutional aspect of Ethereum was super important in 2025 we knew it will be very pivotal year for institutions um then we did a bit of response to people saying Ethereum doesn't care about founders founders went to other ecosystems uh so we restructured ecode and built a lot of um we put a lot of effort into founders applications talking about applications.

Uh so generally ecode reconstruction was from James Smith and he brought a lot of talent in structure leadership and uh and we started looking at various categories founders builders and so on. Um then we changed a bit the grant strategy. So we made it much much harder for a lot of local events to get funding directly on the financial side from the foundation. But we put much more effort to uh include a lot of like amplification talking about events promoting them through through the new communication strategy social media and so on. Uh one very very big and important thing was restructuring protocol cluster at Ethereum foundation.

Grants, Communication & Institutional Focus

So uh connecting more closely the researchers and engineers. Uh we've been told that in the past researchers and engineers would have to organize special dinners at the events to talk to each other a bit more. Uh now they are working at the same teams. are mixed together uh and they focus on the specific tracks particularly we talk about scale one scale two improve UX interrupt uh and that's where researchers engineers working are working together on uh on getting the goals delivered uh trillion dollar security was big initiative on u reviewing the ecosystem for uh for what are the biggest pain points on on security aspects and uh then we had two forks shipped back traffic da big feedback from the

ecosystem. We didn't ship on time. There's lots of delay. Sometimes we took one and a half year to deliver a fork. Uh so we showed that we can deliver two forks a year and uh maybe this year we'll repeat it. Maybe this will be more like every nine months but it's going a good direction and we we have some standards and forecast and so on. Uh privacy cluster changes. Uh but this is still still being structured and we talked about 10 years of Ethereum. is celebrated around the world. Uh the centralized AI team was uh established and uh then we started habs physical habs with uh the external teams. So again most of the cases they either not funded at all or barely funded by term

Protocol Team Restructure & Shipping Upgrades Faster

foundation. Those habs we push a lot for the local teams being able to be self-sufficient and have local sponsors usually either VCs or some very very vibrant communities with sponsors from the local teams and zikvms were really big topic. So that's that's a summary of the last year. Uh probably many other things but uh those were the ones that I was usually talking about the most. Uh and here's a bit of quick review on in pictures. So we announced protocol changes in June. Uh in May we were announcing trillion dollar security initiative. Uh this is the dashboard that was just launched recently. So here's more like a result of that work for 2026. So we continue this. Uh treasury policy was announced in June.

Security Initiatives & New Teams

Um I think that we'll see a bit more of the results of this one because this like in in a week or two we'll be announcing D5 coordination team. Uh finally made some uh important hires for that team for a long time. We're looking for the right people. I'm super excited about the people that will be supporting DI at the foundation. Uh and also I just learned that we are in a queue for the validators to to push them to mainet. So EM foundation will maintain some of the validators to stake its own if uh so these are two two parts of the treasury policy. Uh the AI team uh recently announced very very timely ERC 80004 landing on mainets to support agentic AI.

Treasury Policy, Validators & DeFi Coordination

Uh these are the habs London, San Francisco, Legos, Dubai, Rome, Hong Kong and 2026 what I would love to see but uh maybe majority of you probably know I'm stepping down uh as the as the coa the foundation but uh this is mostly the strategy that we're setting setting for 2026 and I think that mostly with the team we agree that this is the direction and also uh this is the reason I feel very comfortable and confident that the team knows where to go and that we have the leaders to execute and and they can do that definitely. uh super super well without uh any any extra chasing or nudging. Uh but obviously you can you can see some adjustments from the from the new leadership. Uh so certifications and credentials for enterprise Ethereum we

want to have institutions to be uh really sure who to work with around the world and and see some some credentials coming from the um foundation and partners telling this these are good providers. Uh postquantum security very big announcement and soon we'll talk about it in details. uh OAF becoming this interperability standard uh that is fastest to to integrate to ship uh DevCon Mumbai. Super excited about uh India finally uh welcoming all the thought leaders and visitors to to uh share the joy of Ethereum probably with thousands or tens of thousands of people there in Mumbai. Um one free five years road map so merging clean lean Ethereum into the car development process. So

2026 Strategy & Global Expansion

this should be announced next week I think. Uh very big thing we bringing um the two streams of work and the protocol that were quite separate into uh into one one timeline um the Agentic Ethereum. So we've seen some fantastic work from uh from Austin and communication team talking about agents on Ethereum uh using 8004 that was shipped uh and I think that kind of Ethereum with base mainet and base uh managed to capture this initial attention of building agents on on Ethereum and lots of new founders builders uh and it's super exciting uh if Balder if Denver so it's a bit of our uh effort to to be here to send much more people encourage people from the EF

to come and present and discuss with everyone. So that's why you see probably that many people from the EF I think like 10 20 people not sure I think there are like around 10 of us here in the audience uh and and we'll continue with Denver and New York City welcoming uh Ethereum to to institutional side but independency from the foundation Eve global runs the major conference in in New York they're planning like six to 8,000 people there uh that would be amazing if it works all right and then global policy support team launched last year uh so we can support the uh policy makers and regulators around the world with workshops education support them to find the right partners to talk to D5 coordination team launching next next

Policy, L2 Ecosystem & Community Growth

week platform team is about talking about Ethereum so it's the best platform for the L2s to launch to build on and the platform team was also uh organizing a big event for all the L2s uh last like two weeks ago it was over 70 people over 20 L2s meeting together to discuss strategy road map and technology uh issuance roundt discussion at EFCC coming and hopefully we'll talk a lot about culture and art on Ethereum through the DevCon Mumbai as well uh so I tried to speedrun it I probably took me more than three minutes sorry for that uh uh uh how do I disable the and this is the topic that I was uh told

Transition to Post-Quantum Security Topic

by my team that I should talk code which is a bit funny because I don't feel the strongest on this topic in a way that I I understand the idea I understand why it's super important for us and I try to explain why it's super important for us. Uh but technically I felt like hm I don't know exactly what we're doing there on the EIP levels or how the team delivered. So it doesn't mean I'm not not prepared. I spent eight hours today preparing for this one for you and reading all the materials that the team sent me. So hopefully I'll be able to summarize but uh you have to forgive me that if there will be some some technical details that I will not explain best or or maybe I'll share with you some information that might be a few months old that was replaced in the

meantime. Um so why is postquantum so important now? Uh because maybe not because the timelines are so bad. The timelines might be suggesting that uh well maybe it's 2030, maybe it's 2035. Some people would say it's 2040 when we have the computers that are actually uh relevant for for risks to cryptography on on Ethereum. Um but a big aspect of everyone talking about postconquer security is that uh there's already some some kind of anxiety among the uh people in the financial industry uh who are looking at Ethereum and thinking is it technology for many years like when you when you're relying on on blockchain and you want to deploy

Why Post-Quantum Matters for Markets & Institutions

systems on public mainet for many years to work there you don't want to have any type of catastrophic risks looming there somewhere uh five to 10 years away from now without people telling you that we have everything under control. So uh majority of our effort now is to to show how much effort we put in the past into planning, researching, scheduling, building road maps for postquantum security. I try to show that. Uh so Bitcoin particularly is uh is very worried about the outcome of the uh postquantum threats. Uh the biggest worry I think is that uh that there is around I think 6 million BTC at risk

Bitcoin & Blockchain Quantum Risk Examples

total. Um some of it is from the taproot accounts I think uh around 1.9 million BTCs like Satoshi accounts and some other legacy accounts. Uh and then you have also uh accounts on on fly that can be intercepted when you're signing transactions. But this is like a a less of a threat because you'd have to have uh quantum computers that are capable of breaking the uh cryptography very very fast. But those majority of those addresses are at risk in Bitcoin. Uh even with quantum computers that will like take weeks to try to to break those addresses, right? So uh this creates a lot of a lot of uncertainty among people that think what what if it comes earlier

especially with AI acceleration now lots of uh lots of new announcements around quantum are coming very fast and I think that there's also a lot of uncertainty about how much we know about the quantum computers as much of that technology might be being developed uh by the governments in stealth mode uh without all the latest uh being published to uh to everyone. So massive uncertainty and um some people claim that it's not that investors are selling BTC because of quantum computers but we see announcements from uh large large banks and uh investment funds that say that it's exactly this why why their

“Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” Threat

uh why their customers are saying sell BTC uh or Ethereum. Um so some problems harvest now decrypt later. This is the idea that with quantum cryptography uh sorry with quantum computers you'll be able to look at existing encrypted traffic that exists nowadays store it for the future and then decrypt it. And now when you think about the threats to blockchain, so if if you're using it for privacy, for encryption and you hope that you will have this um like forward security that that will not get uh decrypted, this is a problem, right? So so specifically for the chains that that rely on security like the Monero I think is at risk that practically in the

future you'll be able to decrypt the entire uh the entire past of the chain all the states and transitions. uh however for signatures and zk proofs what is important is everything that's in the past is actually safe we're just risking that in the future the moment when the quantum computers are uh are advanced enough that they uh they could break that cryptography you could generate like false signatures or break signatures for the future and and also um generate proofs for the false statements in the zk space but everything that was before the quantum computers you can say okay this is uh this was proved in the past and it's not at risk. So that's why on blockchains

What Is Actually at Risk on Ethereum

like we're not that much worried in Ethereum about the uh the past signature. So it's just that when the quantum computers appear and you have to have either be ready for that and transition all the accounts by that time to postquantum security uh or have some emergency solutions. Um we see Coinbase announcing advisory board and uh you see here Justin Drake from interim foundation uh and a few other uh well distinguished people. So more and more institutions are trying to announce we are getting ready we are ready and we're thinking about it and it foundation is trying to be very very vocal about it as well just to calm everyone down and say yes sirum is credibly secure for many many years

Institutional Anxiety & Market Reactions

forward and we're thinking about everything that is potentially putting things at risk. Um here Nick Carter mentioning that there's this discrepancy on how developers are thinking about postquantum security how markets are thinking about postquantum security because uh markets are thinking in terms of risks and developers usually think about the timelines like when it appears we can quickly update that they don't think about it at two three years before we have to be ready because otherwise there is this anxiety in the market right like uh the the markets will think oh there's like uncertainty so we'll better move away and the markets one thing is the financial markets but the second thing is like the anxiety about deciding to build on that technology deciding to choose that technology in

the institution where you have to plan two to five years strategically ahead uh here is announcement from Jeff 10% BTC allocation from Asia portfolio removed uh citing quantum as existential threat uh first major institution portfolio example Bloomberg article and uh city bank announced quantum threat trillion dollar security race. Uh and not only blockchain, they were talking also about the the cryptography used in banks and financial institutions nowadays, but they also mentioned the potential risks related to to bitcoin.

NIST Standards & Timeline Expectations

25% of bitcoins um that are potentially quantum exposed and uh large probability that things by 2034 break. Um here is NIST announcing the um the postquantum secure cryptography standards. So the signatures that will be uh that should be used and they say by 2030 uh people should be ready. The systems should uh should deprecate legacy signature algorithms and by 2035 those should be banned entirely. uh so it doesn't mean that by that time for sure we have the postquantum computers that will be threats but that expectation is that everyone is ready by

that time in the probably like in the institution governments agencies and like licensed licensed operators in the US uh and vital quotes the postquantum security as the very important requirement for the walk away test for Ethereum that we cannot oify Ethereum unless we say uh Ethereum is quantum secure because really everything would break. So we have to say over the next few years very important delivery set of deliveries is making entire TRM stack quantum secure all the aspect signatures uh data availability uh signatures on the execution layer but also signatures on the consensus layer.

Ethereum Requirements for Quantum Security

How is time I I don't know I assume that I have 10 more minutes. Okay, perfect. Uh so there is a series of blog posts on the if research forum posts that talk about the uh proposed transaction signature schemes and how to approach it from the account abstraction way on on Ethereum uh to be quantum secure on Ethereum and um first of all Falcon is uh this latisbased signature scheme that is uh one of the one of the schemes proposed by NIST as a standard and um and it specific properties. So the good thing is that it is very well defined work running time which is important in the

EVM case where you don't want to like uh calculate the gas costs and optimizations and manage clients based on the absolutely worst scenarios because then you can analyze the targeted attack scenarios right so all the Ethereum when you think about scaling we always look at the worst case scenario not about the average it would be nice to think about performance oh on average we're doing this well but it doesn't matter at all because the moment when you do that then the attacker will just flood the network with the transactions that are specifically designed to get the worst case scenario. So, so it's important to know what that this worst case scenario is. Um, the bad thing about it is and I was meant to um put it in bold. Uh,

Falcon Signatures & Cryptography Challenges

okay. It's like uh generally it says that it's it's difficult. as like the the falcon signatures and many of the postquantum signatures are considered to be very very difficult maps and cryptography and because of that uh we don't have that kind of uh comfort of having many many years of established libraries that are considered very safe. So if you if you implement those uh you have risks of side channel attacks because not only you implementing the cryptography well but also you have to implement it in a way uh that makes sure that uh that like the execution times and the effects on the hardware are not uh not affected by the by the numbers

Side-Channel Risks & Implementation Difficulty

the actual operations that you execute or the paths that you're taking. So you have to ensure that your library is taking always the same paths and uh using the same uh like same load on CPU and so on otherwise you can observe it uh through the side channels and and extract some information. So many cryptographers will say one thing is to implement it properly and the other thing is to prevent any kind of willingness to optimize through the solutions that would potentially expose the libraries to to site site channel attacks. uh here also some problems on the aggregation. So there are some aggregation solutions for for the signatures that are based on

Falcon but that uh decreases the efficiency even more. uh and then what is suggested really is the hashbased multi- signature solutions and uh I think Ethereum now in the consensus layer is choosing e xmss um we'll mention it and also some solutions for aggregation on e uh so consensus side uh the ethereum research now is proposing solutions around xmss and that's what mostly was worked on in the lean ethereum road map right and I mentioned that we integrating lean ethereum into the core development protocol uh roadmap proposal which means that we'll be proposing postquantum security road map uh to the allcore defs for review and that's where

XMSS & Consensus Layer Approaches

we have implementations we've tracked uh goals metrics on how fast they executing um well and now coming back so what what were the requirements for postquantum work at ethereum so knowing exactly what the threats are what types of attacks can be then executed against ethereum um having very predictable migration paths for the accounts and this is one of the biggest problem of the postquantum security. You have to take all the accounts existing on blockchain and ensure that somehow the users will execute an action of upgrading to postquantum to the to the new signature schemes. If they don't tweak any action then potentially the accounts are at risks at risk and even if those accounts are are dead is like nobody nobody holds keys because the the keys were lost or

Migrating Existing Accounts Safely

whatever uh then it's still a problem because then quantum attacks may recover if or BTC in the context of Bitcoin and and that may create the general feeling of uncertainty additional risks around technology. Uh so there are some solutions on Ethereum that say well here is the emergency approach. You assume that uh if somebody holds keys that most likely they also holds the uh pimage of the of the hashing solutions of the keys generation. So they may hold for example the uh I forgot the word for this which is obvious like when you have uh 12 or 16 uh words to to seat phrase. Yeah. Uh so so you can do the emergency approach

where people would have to zk prove that they hold the seat phrase that is pretty much for the generation of the public key. Uh and then you can lock those accounts until someone posts the uh the proof but then you're still risking that those who generated keys directly without the seat phrase uh might be might be at risk of never being able to recover the funds. Uh sorry and um well we want to have bunch of implementations without this formal verification is accelerating a lot now. We had examples of form of verification that was done very fast thanks to AI. Uh they want to analyze like the performance changes, economy of the changes of like how how quickly the uh the signatures can spread and what's the cost of uh of hardware to execute.

Emergency Recovery & Seed Phrase Proofs

So economy more like of the of the block space. But the good thing is by scaling L1 we also create more space for for scaling the the space for for new type of uh of signatures like the this basic transactions might be let's say 10 20 times more expensive than than nowadays because of the signatures in postquantum and generally expect that the entire ecosystem is ready. So the the wallets the operators of the validators that everyone switches and um and is ready to upgrades together. So one think is to do the research implementations the other thing is to do the entire migration transition. So if you think that the first part might be two three years then again you have integration will go over two three years unless people really

Implementation, Verification & Ecosystem Migration

feel there is emergency. Um what are the misconceptions about the work? Uh that oh the the first one the first sentence I I really love that uh that we pointing out that just because the action might be limited at some point it doesn't mean that there is no not a lot of work that has been already done. Uh that the researchers might decide to go with with simple changes gradual improvements but this is a result of uh three or four years of review of all the details and very very good understanding of all the possibilities attacks and so on. uh and the misunderstanding is that we would do that with a simple single change. Most likely it will be a series of changes and multiple modules being changed over time. Um I'll start accelerating.

Misconceptions About the Work

So this is quick a quick review of things that we're doing. Consensus layer uh linse VM linspec. So three things that we work on. They're also pre-ompiles for the uh for the new for the new signatures. And here's the road map actually that when it was presented in uh in Bangkok that people said Ethereum is is slow and it's thinking very slowly about the road maps. But now it shows that we already two years into a lot of preparation for postquantum and that nowadays it starts calming down people because they say oh we already midway and we're building the solutions that we've worked on. So that road map was not that bad in the end. So Ethereum shows that that road map is being followed.

Lean Ethereum Roadmap & Devnets

>> Can you go to the previous one once? >> Sure. I can share the slides later. Um and this is tracking the performance of the uh the lean signatures the the signatures. I think this one is for hashbased. Okay. So it's XMss. And we already seeing the the verification times uh that look promising. And then for multiigs uh for aggregations it's a bit slower but generally the progress is very very promising. So we are super happy with with the work. Uh these are the devets that were launched for interperability between the clients multiple clients implementing devets for postquantum. Uh now uh postquantum devet 2 I think is is active at the moment.

Uh here is the research progress. So the website the Lin Ethereum lean road map website is is extremely detailed and very well coordinating the all the efforts for for postquantum security on Ethereum. Um here are some some of the video examples postquantum security link call 2 in February last year and uh subspec in September 25 and we continue with lots of specifications and and you can track everything. Um here is the emergency response that I mentioned about here is the announcements from Justin Drake from two or three weeks ago that we rushed immediately after we realized that financial markets globally start to talk more and more about the threats and start feeling very very anxious and we said okay let's let's publish that is really really well

Performance Benchmarks & Testing Progress

prepared it's a lot of work but also lots of work has been done uh so the alords postquantum run by Antonio Seno every two weeks uh the the devets running the workshops being executed there was meeting in Cambridge and we plan another one this year in KHN and then again in Cambridge I think in October. Uh they form a verification and uh and massive funding for those million dollars for uh for the bounty uh postquantum road map integrating and education and this and this and this these are all examples of calls and massive work executed. Uh here's a road map that Optimus announced for 10 years. Uh this website is coming with the uh with the

Ongoing Research, Funding & Collaboration

post quantum materium very soon. And here is all the refs. Thank you so much.