Banks and financial regulators across Europe, the Middle East and Asia have joined a cross-regional pilot testing quantum-resistant infrastructure for digital asset wallets and onchain transfers.

The initiative was announced on Monday by the Responsible Fintech Institute (RFI) and Safeheron, a crypto custody infrastructure provider, according to the official announcement.

The pilot runs on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet, a testing environment built on the NEAR layer-1 blockchain, and uses a multiparty computation (MPC) protocol supporting ML-DSA-65. ML-DSA is a post-quantum digital signature standard finalized by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in August 2024 as FIPS 204, one of three post-quantum standards the agency released that month, and is derived from the lattice-based CRYSTALS-Dilithium algorithm, with ML-DSA-65 denoting one of its security parameter sets. MPC, a technique widely used in crypto custody, distributes control of a private key across multiple parties so that no single participant ever holds the complete key.

RFI said participating regulators include Abu Dhabi Global Market, the international financial centre in the United Arab Emirates whose regulator has operated a dedicated crypto-asset framework since 2018; Bhutan's Gelephu Financial Services Office; and Malta's Financial Services Authority, which oversees the island's Virtual Financial Assets regime introduced in 2018. Bison Bank and DK Bank are taking part as financial institutions.

During the trial, the banks will test wallet generation and transfers in a shared application environment. Regulators will observe the first phase and contribute to a governance workstream later, with participation levels differing between institutions.

The organizers plan to publish a white paper covering the research, protocol design and test findings, and eventually open-source the underlying technology.

The pilot comes as financial authorities prepare for quantum computers that could undermine the public-key cryptography, such as RSA and elliptic-curve schemes, that secures much of today's internet and underpins most blockchains. One widely discussed scenario is 'harvest now, decrypt later,' in which adversaries collect encrypted data or exposed public keys today with the aim of breaking them once sufficiently powerful quantum machines exist. For blockchains, the exposure is structural: Bitcoin, Ethereum and most other major networks sign transactions with elliptic-curve signatures, and once a public key is revealed onchain it remains permanently visible in the ledger's history. Post-quantum signatures such as ML-DSA also run into the thousands of bytes, far larger than the tens of bytes typical of elliptic-curve signatures, a practical consideration for blockchains where every byte of transaction data must be stored and processed by the network.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city's banking regulator, aims to make Hong Kong's banking sector fully prepared for quantum-related security risks by 2030. Separately, a 2025 paper from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) urged financial institutions to begin coordinated, phased migrations to post-quantum systems. NIST's draft transition guidance, published in late 2024, proposes deprecating quantum-vulnerable public-key algorithms after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035 — timelines that frame the phased migration the BIS has called for.

Related: Ethereum Foundation pivots away from Poseidon in post-quantum plan