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 most vulnerable to quantum attacks.
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 challenge is choosing the right hash function, because the selection takes 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 tags
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 extremely 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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