Cryptocurrencies have been obsessed with speed, fees, and scalability for years. Now you may have to face a more existential question: what happens when your core security fails?
This issue is moving from theory to urgency. Quantum computers, machines that use the principles of quantum physics to process information in fundamentally different ways than today’s computers, could eventually solve the types of mathematical problems that underpin modern encryption.
Discussions around post-quantum cryptography have intensified across the industry in recent weeks, especially after new research from Google and academic collaborators suggested that such systems could one day break widely used encryption, potentially cracking systems like Bitcoin in minutes rather than years.
As Bitcoin developers struggle to find a solution and Ethereum prepares for the event, Solana is trying to get ahead of that scenario.
Cryptography company Project Eleven has partnered with the Solana Foundation to experiment with post-quantum security, technology designed to resist quantum attacks that could render current cryptography obsolete. Early work is already bringing to light a difficult reality: making Solana quantum safe may come at the expense of the performance that defines it.
In practice, that effort has meant going beyond theory and conducting live testing. Project Eleven has worked with the Solana ecosystem to model how the network would behave if its current cryptography were replaced, including implementing a test environment using quantum-resistant signatures – the digital keys that authorize transactions. The goal is not just to demonstrate that the technology works, but to understand what goes wrong when taken to scale.
The first results show a clear trade-off.
The new quantum-secure “signatures” that approve transactions are much larger and heavier than those used today, about 20 to 40 times larger, Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden, who founded the project after years in cryptocurrencies and venture capital, told CoinDesk, bringing a mix of military and industrial experience to the problem. That means the network can handle far fewer transactions at a time. In tests, a version of Solana that used this new cryptography ran about 90% slower than it does today, Pruden said.
This trade-off goes right to the heart of Solana’s design. The blockchain has built its reputation on high performance and low latency, positioning itself as one of the fastest networks in crypto. But post-quantum cryptography, while more secure against future threats, comes with heavier data and computational requirements, making it difficult to maintain those speeds.
‘Choose any wallet’
Solana may also face a more immediate structural challenge than its peers.
Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, where wallet addresses are typically derived from hashed public keys, Solana exposes public keys directly. That difference matters in a quantum scenario. “On Solana, 100% of the network is vulnerable,” Pruden said.
“A quantum computer could pick any wallet and immediately start trying to recover the private key.”
Pruden, a former Army Green Beret, first became interested in Bitcoin while deployed to the Middle East, then worked at Coinbase and joined Andreessen Horowitz’s venture team on its first fund. He then became an early leader of the privacy-focused Aleo blockchain before launching Project Eleven, a company focused on preparing digital assets for what he calls “Q-day,” the moment when quantum computers can break current cryptography.
Meanwhile, some developers in the Solana ecosystem are looking for simpler, more immediate solutions. An example is something called ‘Winternitz Vaults’, which uses a different type of cryptography that is believed to be more secure against quantum attacks. Rather than changing the entire network, these tools focus on protecting individual wallets, giving users a way to protect their funds now, while larger system-wide updates are still being discovered.
Despite those obstacles, Solana has moved faster than much of the industry in at least one aspect: experimentation. “There’s something tangible,” Pruden said. “In fact, we have a test network with post-quantum signatures.” He added that the Solana Foundation “deserves credit for at least committing and wanting to do the work.”
Across the cryptocurrency world, that level of participation remains rare. While some ecosystems, most notably Ethereum, have begun to discuss long-term migration paths, concrete implementation has been limited.
The broader challenge is not only technical, but also social: upgrading cryptography in decentralized systems requires coordination between developers, validators, applications and users, all of which must move in sequence.
For Pruden, the risk is that the industry waits too long to begin that process. “This is a problem of tomorrow, until it is a problem of today,” he said. “And then it takes four years to fix it.”
Read more: Here’s how bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks are preparing for the looming quantum threat
