Buterin Outlines Ethereum’s Quantum Resistance Roadmap

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a plan to address four areas of the network that he sees as the most quantum-vulnerable.

Quantum computing and crypto have been in the headlines recently due to the increasing resilience of Bitcoin and other blockchains with quantum-enabled supercomputers.

Buterin released his quantum security roadmap for Ethereum on Thursday, which he described as four areas: verification signatures, data storage, user identity signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs.

Replacing the existing BLS (Bonneh-Lin-Shacham) consensus signatures with «Lin» quantum-secure hash-based signatures would fix that element, he said. The tricky part is choosing the right hash function, as this choice can take a long time.

«This could be the ‘ultimate hash function of Ethereum,' so it's important to choose wisely,» he said.

In August 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed “LinEthereum”, a plan to make the network quantum secure.

Quantum secure data storage and accounts

Regarding data storage or «blobs», Ethereum currently uses a system called KZG (Kate-Zavercha-Goldberg) to store and verify data.

The plan is to exchange this for STARKs (Zero-Knowledge Scalable Open Arguments of Knowledge), which are quantum-resistant. «It's manageable, but there's a lot of engineering,» Buterin said.

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The third challenge is user accounts. Ethereum currently uses ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) signatures, which are standard cryptographic keys. The fix is ​​to upgrade the network so tags can use any signature scheme, including «lattice-based» quantum-proof ones.

However, quantum-secure signatures are computationally intensive and consume a lot of gas.

«The long-term fix is ​​protocol-layer frequency signature and verification summation, which can reduce these bottlenecks to close to zero,» he said.

Quantum-proof proofs are very expensive

Quantum-resistant proofs are prohibitively expensive to implement on-chain, so «the solution is again protocol-layer recursive signatures and checksums,» Buterin said.

Instead of verifying each signature and proof individually onchain, a single master proof or «proof frame» verifies thousands of them at once, keeping costs to zero.

«In this way, a block can ‘contain' a thousand confirmation frames, each containing a 3KB signature or a 256KB confirmation,» he explained.

Buterin commented on the Ethereum Foundation's «Strawmap» on Thursday, stating that he expects to see «progressive reductions in both entry times and deadlines.»

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