Ethereum developers draw up anti-quantum plan to protect $104 billion pledge system

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Quantum computers have not yet been able to break the blockchain, but Ethereum developers have taken precautions.

A draft submitted to the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) warehouse on Monday proposes to rebuild the contract for users to join the network pledge system. The core goal is to reserve space for encryption formats that quantum computers cannot crack.

To pledge on Ethereum, a deposit contract is required to lock ETH. Currently, the contract only accepts keys formatted based on the BLS12 -381 scheme, and the specific size of these keys is directly written into the code. The public key is fixed to 48 bytes, and the signature metadata is 96 bytes. Anti-quantum solutions require much more space and cannot be provided by existing contracts.

New contract for the future

The draft replaces the existing contract with a new contract capable of processing up to 8,192 bytes of key and credential data each. Under the new system, each deposit must declare the encryption scheme it uses. BLS is specified as scenario zero. The proposal itself does not define other options. In the future, there will be another independent EIP to determine the actual form of the anti-quantum verifier key and the network verification method.

Alternative contracts have three states: disabled, BLS enabled, and BLS retired. Changing a contract to a retirement model is an irreversible switch. Once triggered, new verifiers will no longer be able to join using the BLS key. Existing validators in the system are not affected. One of the warehouse's maintainers suggested that the proposal be numbered EIP-8394.

The draft also removes the deposit processing system that has been used since the launch of the Ethereum pledge feature in 2022, moving the feature to a newer framework that is already used to process withdrawals and verifier updates. Before all this goes online, coordination forking needs to be carried out simultaneously at the execution and consensus levels. In the current draft, the contract address, deployment code and activation timestamp are listed as "pending".

Currently, approximately 42.4 million ETH are in pledge status on the Ethereum network, worth approximately US$104 billion at current prices. Every pledged ETH is protected by a BLS key, and the proposal will eventually abandon this format.

Cryptography discussions behind the proposal

Thomas Colatge, one of the three authors of the proposal, posted a post on the X platform on the day the draft was submitted. He summarized a speech by Stanford University cryptographer Dan Bonet, saying that both Ethereum and Bitcoin tend to choose hash-based digital signatures as their quantum-resistant format. The stateless version standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a size of approximately 8KB per signature, which is in line with the 8,192-byte limit set by the new contract. A more compact alternative comes with a counter that permanently exposes the private key once it is reused by the signer. "Anti-quantum cryptography is not a simple upgrade," Colatre wrote.

This deposit contract proposal only involves the verifier entrance. Another companion proposal, EIP-8141, is being considered for inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade expected later this year, which would allow regular Ethereum accounts to change their encryption scheme without migrating to a new wallet address. Together, the two proposals cover both daily users and validators running the network.

Google's quantum AI team released a report in March 2026, pointing out that quantum computers may launch five attack paths against Ethereum, putting more than $100 billion in wallets, pledges, smart contracts and second-layer network systems at risk. Quantum security company Project Eleven estimated in May 2026 that the probability that a machine capable of cracking elliptic curve signatures will appear will exceed 50% by 2033, while 2030 is considered a possible earlier point. The same report found that more than 65% of ETH is stored at addresses where the public key is already visible on the chain. The Ethereum Foundation is setting 2029 as a target date for changes to the core agreement.