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BTC 
ETH Despite fierce controversy over the timeline, scientists agree that a sufficiently advanced quantum computer will be able to inversely deduce private keys from public keys, undermining Bitcoin's security and causing billions of dollars to be stolen. That's why people are racing to develop ways to upgrade Bitcoin to protect it from attacks.
Size of the reduced quantum signature
One of Blockstream's most promising research areas is an optimized quantum signature scheme for Bitcoin needs, allowing blockchain to retain more existing features that Bitcoin holders value. The size of a batch of post-quantum secure hashing and lattice-based signature schemes currently recognized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is 38 to 123 times larger than Bitcoin's existing ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. Deploying any option in Bitcoin could cause blockchain speeds to drop to less than 1 transaction per second. Ethereum's post-quantum team plans to solve this problem by using a tiny zero-knowledge proof for each block to aggregate signatures. Bitcoin is also considering this option, and if implemented, Bitcoin will actually run faster than it is now because a single certificate takes up less block space than a stack of signatures. But in the Bitcoin world, introducing zero-knowledge proof would be a fairly radical change, and there would be huge challenges in getting enough support to activate it. Blockstream is also considering this option, but wisely separates the proposal from another, more acceptable option, which is to study how to reduce the size of NIST approved hash-based post-quantum signatures by about 13.23 times.
Smaller signature optimized for Bitcoin
In December 2025, Blockstream researchers Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov announced the SHRINCS signature scheme, and the opcode proposal was released in May. This is a hash-based post-quantum signature scheme with a minimum size of 548 bytes (plus a 48-byte public key), but a maximum size of 4619 bytes. "SHRINCS is the most post-quantum signature design anyone has proposed to date that conforms to Bitcoin's native characteristics," explained Marin Ivezic, author of PostQuantum.com and founder of Applied Quantum. "It fully supports BIP-39 seed recovery, and its security is based on the same SHA-256 assumptions on which Bitcoin mining relies." He told a magazine that the plan is still in its early stages, has not yet been audited, and has not undergone years of public cryptanalysis like the NIST signature. But he said it was a strong contender even in the early stages. "It's real code, real transactions have been signed on the Liquid mainnet, and I think it's the strongest answer to post-quantization without disrupting the Bitcoin block economy." Although much smaller than most post-quantum signatures, SHRINCS is still about nine times larger than Bitcoin's existing Schnorr signature (64 bytes) or the older ECDSA signature (70 bytes). One might think that if a signature is nine times larger than it is currently, it would be necessary to increase Bitcoin's block size by nine times to compensate, but Ivezic explained that this is not the case due to Bitcoin's SegWit. "Under isolated witness, the signature byte is located in the witness data, which occupies only one-quarter of the space of other transaction data." he said. According to estimates published by earlier Blockstream research (using slightly different parameters), if everyone used Taproot's Schnorr signature (about 80% of people didn't), Bitcoin could process 6.5 transactions per second. If the NIST approved lattice-based signature ML-DSA is used, the blockchain speed will drop to 0.5 TPS; if the NIST approved hash-based signature SPHINCS+ is used, it will only be 0.36 TPS. But with SHRINCS, blockchain speeds can reach 3TPS, similar to today. SHRINCS conducted production testing on Liquid sidechain in March this year-they even included a Bitcoin white paper. So, if it works in a production environment, everything will be fine and Bitcoin's quantum problem will be solved, right?
SHRINCS sounds great: What's the problem?
As BIP warns,"security proof is pending," which means the research is promising but not yet a fully verified and mature proposal for cryptography. It also introduces additional complexity into Bitcoin. Each signature uses a new one-time key, and one of the reasons why SPHINCS+ is so huge is that it wraps all these one-time keys in a multi-layered hash tree structure, making the scheme stateless. SHRINCS removes all of this to save space and stores only used keys on the device (so-called stateful), allowing you to quickly check whether keys are being reused. The disadvantage is that the signature grows by 16 bytes each time it is used, and if the device is lost, a very large "stateless fallback" transaction of approximately 5777 bytes is required to recover. Yoon Auh, founder of BOLTS Technologies, said that in reducing the size, the designers of SHRINCS have added "assumptions about statelessness, compact signature paths, fallback mechanisms, number of seed initialization times, and rules for when a device must switch to a larger stateless signature." "This may be pragmatic engineering practice, but it is also the complexity and vulnerability introduced to maximize throughput and minimize computing cycles. In Bitcoin, every new consensus rule becomes a permanent maintenance obligation, and every wallet assumption can become a pattern for user failure."
Improve SHRINCS and add SHRIMPS
Blockstream has been studying and optimizing the solution throughout 2026. Just last week, it demonstrated that SHRINCS and a series of other post-quantum signature schemes can work effectively on ordinary hardware wallets. However, BIP also warns that this is not without risk: the SHRINCS keys of stateless components generated using supertree pruning are incompatible with SHRINCS implementations that do not support supertree pruning. In fact, importing keys between such incompatible implementations may result in financial losses. In March, the lab released a companion plan called SHRIMPS that will be used in conjunction with SHRINCS to allow backup devices initialized from the same seed to sign transactions. The name SHRIMPS has now been removed from BIP and the scheme has been integrated into a built-in stateless path under the same 48-byte public key. It has been optimized with a set of non-standard parameters and has been reduced in size by approximately 26% compared to the original. Blockstream is also experimenting with lattice-based signature schemes, which are typically smaller than hash-based schemes but are considered immature and less reliable. At the same time, it is also considering using zero-knowledge proof to aggregate signatures. It is estimated that if zero-knowledge proof is used in conjunction with SHRINCS, Bitcoin's speed can double to 6.7 TPS. Blockstream wisely separates signature selection from the issue of increasing block size or adding zero-knowledge proof aggregation, as considering them together may hinder the adoption of SHRINCS. Every post-quantum upgrade of Bitcoin will be controversial and difficult to get enough support to activate it. Ivezic said: "The constraint on Bitcoin's quantum migration is not cryptography, but governance. Between BIP-360, BIP-361, SHRINCS and STARKs, the engineering menu is rapidly filling. What Bitcoin lacks is a mechanism to make choices between them before time runs out."
