Crypto Firms Race to 'Quantum-Proof' Wallets Before Bitcoin, Ethereum Networks Catch Up

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In brief - Firms are building quantum-resistant wallets ahead of blockchain upgrades. - Approaches range from MPC upgrades to layer-2 overlays. - Experts say user behavior and coordination remain weak points in quantum upgrade rollouts. Crypto companies are moving to secure their wallet and custody offerings against a future quantum computing threat, aiming to upgrade user-facing infrastructure faster than blockchains can change their core protocols. The shift reflects a growing view that network-level upgrades to blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum could take years, leaving wallets exposed in the meantime. And the timeline for the purported “Q-Day” threat to crypto could be coming faster than expected, with one recent estimate putting it as soon as 2030. One company working to bring post-quantum security to crypto wallets is Silence Laboratories, which said it has added support for distributed—or multi-party computation (MPC)—signatures using ML-DSA, a cryptographic algorithm selected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Jay Prakash, CEO and co-founder of Silence Laboratories, said the company’s work follows recent developments in post-quantum cryptography, including NIST’s approval of three algorithms: SPHINCS+, Falcon, and CRYSTALS-Dilithium. Prakash said the company spent the past six months evaluating those algorithms for distributed signing systems used by custodians and institutional wallets. "Not all of SPHINCS+, Falcon, and CRYSTALS-Dilithium will meet the criteria of multi-party computation (MPC) friendliness—whether they support efficient distributed transaction signing—and a potential fragmentation has to be factored in too, because each chain is picking a different scheme with its own optimization criteria, signature size, or compute efficiency," Prakash said. The key, he added, is generated as shares across isolated nodes, and a signature is produced jointly without the key ever being reconstructed. That helps protect against the threat of quantum computers, which are estimated to be able to break current cryptography within a matter of years. And businesses understand the need, Prakash added. "Institutions are now wired to distributed signing,” he said. “Whether it's a partner like BitGo or a bank building a digital asset practice, they all understand that keys can't sit in one place.” MPC systems split private keys across multiple devices—a standard setup for custodians and institutional wallets. Silence Laboratories said its approach is designed to work within that existing structure, allowing firms to upgrade without changing how their systems operate. “Any bank or custodian with existing MPC infrastructure can now migrate to a post-quantum MPC-based wallet, without changing their infrastructure," Prakash said. "It's a code upgrade. After that, they have a post-quantum-secure signing layer." The upgrade happens at the wallet level, meaning users would not need to take action. "With a post-quantum wallet SDK, institutions get a clean upgrade path on the infrastructure they already run," Prakash said. "No heavy architectural migration—they're already using MPC. The developer could upgrade the algorithm in the library, and the end user—whether they're on a wallet like MetaMask, or anything else—would have the same experience, now post-quantum-secure." The split reflects a broader divide in how the industry is approaching quantum risk. Some developers are focusing on wallet-level upgrades, while others argue that only protocol-level changes to the crypto networks themselves can fully protect users. Other companies are taking different approaches to the problem. Developers behind a wallet from Postquant Labs are building a system that adds quantum-resistant signatures on top of Bitcoin by using a separate smart contract layer, avoiding changes to the base protocol. Similar ideas have been proposed, including work from StarkWare researcher Avihu Mordechai Levy, which replaces Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve cryptography with hash-based signatures that operate within the network’s existing rules. The design is described as a “last-resort” approach rather than a scalable solution, and could be very costly. However, the challenge is timing, and while quantum computers capable of breaking current cryptography do not yet exist, recent advancements have experts focusing on the timetable. That uncertainty is driving companies to act early, but wallet-level fixes have limits. “If wallets are upgraded to post-quantum and chains are not upgrading,” Prakash added, “it won't work.”

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