Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Says The Blockchain Must Achieve Full Quantum Resistance ‘As Soon As Possible’

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Ethereum should not wait until the last moment before working towards quantum resistance, co-founder Vitalik Buterin says.

“We should resist the trap of saying ‘let’s delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing [sic] out more efficiencies for a while longer,'” Buterin said on X on Jan. 12. “Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not.”

Buterin said Ethereum holders should be able to say the protocol is cryptographically secure for the next 100 years “as soon as possible” and “as a point of pride.”

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Concerns about the threat of quantum computing to cryptocurrencies have grown over the past year, following the launch of Google’s Willow chip. Many observers now fear that the development of a quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptography securing most cryptocurrencies is no longer a distant reality.

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Buterin’s remarks on quantum-proofing Ethereum were part of a long post calling for the protocol to mature to the point that it can continue to run as intended should developers walk away.

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“Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test,” he said. “Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools – the hammer that once you buy it’s yours – than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive).”

Beyond quantum resistance, Buterin said Ethereum should scale to support thousands of transactions per second, embrace full account abstraction, be resistant to denial-of-service attacks and maintain a censorship-resistant block-building model.