Ethereum developers have roughly 24 months from the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade to implement three hard forks and complete the network's transition to a post-quantum and post-AI state by December 2028, according to Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake.

Drake laid out the accelerated timeline during Devcon 8 in Mumbai on Tuesday. The target runs a full year ahead of the Ethereum Foundation's official deadline of December 2029 — and the schedule matters because the signatures that today authorize every user transaction and validator action rely on math a sufficiently large quantum computer could break, making the clock relevant to both user funds and staked ETH.

"Our hope is that by December 2028 we'll be able to wrap up the full post-quantum and post-AI transition," Drake said at the start of the event.

The Foundation's Official Goal Remains December 2029

The official date stems from the foundation's September 7 post on protocol priorities. According to that post, the Protocol cluster aims to make all of Ethereum's execution, consensus, and data layers — the components that run transactions, coordinate validators, and store chain data — resistant to quantum computing by December 2029.

The team stated that the December 2029 deadline is "non-negotiable at least until January 2027." In January 2027, the team plans to recheck quantum progress with outside experts, making that review the first scheduled point at which the deadline could be reassessed.

The 2029 schedule was already described as "quite aggressive" in the September post. Full post-quantum readiness requires five hard forks after the Glamsterdam upgrade. If Glamsterdam ships in December 2026 and the fifth fork arrives in December 2029, the forks would need to land at an average rate of one every 7.2 months. Drake's plan calls for three forks across 24 months, or one every eight months. A minimum viable post-quantum milestone could still be reached by December 2029 on a 12-month fork cadence.

Hash-Based Signatures to Replace Today's Keys by 2028

In August, Drake said leanVM technology would be ready for real-world use in 2027, with quantum-safe upgrades then reaching all three parts of the network in 2028.

The plan relies on hash-based signatures, which quantum computers are not expected to break. One such scheme, leanSPHINCS, would be used to sign transactions.

Ethereum currently uses BLS signatures for validators and ECDSA for user accounts. Both are elliptic-curve methods that a very large quantum computer could break.

Validators also maintain a setting that tells Ethereum where to send their staked ETH when they withdraw, and some of those settings still rely on BLS keys. EIP-8365 begins phasing them out now, ahead of the completion of the full quantum-safe design for validators — making legacy withdrawal credentials one of the concrete points where quantum-vulnerable keys currently touch staked ETH.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned in October that progress in AI-driven mathematics could weaken lattice cryptography — the primary candidate to replace today's signatures — within two years. Even so, he advised crypto holders not to rush to transfer their funds to new wallets. Hash-based schemes such as leanSPHINCS stand apart from that specific concern: their security rests on hash functions rather than the lattice structures Buterin flagged.

Glamsterdam's own timeline has already slipped. After auditors discovered gas-accounting flaws in two of the upgrade's proposals, its activation on the Hoodi testnet — the public rehearsal network where Ethereum stages upgrades before mainnet — originally scheduled for October 26, was postponed. That reduces the likelihood of the fork going live on mainnet in December, leaving the Hoodi activation and the January 2027 quantum review as the nearest milestones for whether either the 2028 target or the official 2029 deadline stays within reach.

Additional details are available via the original report on Cryptopolitan.