The Ethereum Foundation’s effort to advance post-quantum readiness on the network’s mainnet entered a new chapter on August 24, when a contributor presented a draft plan to integrate quantum-safe keys into the contract validators use to join the network.

If the proposal draft clears every stage through finalization, it would set off a process in which the network rebuilds and permanently switches off its current signature scheme. For Ethereum, that matters because validator signatures sit at the base of consensus and deposit handling, so any replacement has to preserve the network’s ability to keep coordinating while changing a core cryptographic primitive.

The urgency to turn draft plans into shipped code on Ethereum mainnet has escalated since advances such as the March 2026 Google Quantum AI document, which slashed the cost of breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography Ethereum uses by about 20 times, per ethereum.org.

Those machines do not exist anywhere in the world right now, but Ethereum is already planning for a future in which they do — as is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NIST plans to deprecate ECDSA by 2030 and disallow it entirely by 2035.

What would the proposed contract change?

The one-line description in the draft proposal filed by Kevaundray Wedderburn, listing Thomas Coratger and Tom Wambsgans as co-authors, in the ethereum/EIPs repository calls for a validator deposit contract with variable length, plus a mode to “irreversibly” retire BLS.

Under Ethereum’s current design, validators sign with a scheme that combines hundreds of thousands of signatures into one to keep consensus efficient. That scheme is BLS, which relies on elliptic curve pairings, per ethereum.org’s quantum-resistance page. The problem is that a quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can solve that kind of math.

The Foundation’s fix is leanXMSS, a hash-based scheme that swaps out BLS’s 96-byte signatures with signatures of nearly 3,000 bytes. Length-flexible contracts, together with a switch that ends BLS for good, resolve the new problem of fitting the larger keys into a deposit contract built with fixed-size fields.

When will the proposal be voted on?

Wedderburn’s proposal is not yet ready to be voted on. The author specifies that the draft is unfinished and that large portions are simply boilerplate covering EIP-7685 mechanics. Wedderburn added that the team still has to blend the draft with existing validator EIPs 7251, 7002 and 8282.

As Vitalik Buterin outlined in a February 2026 roadmap, the Ethereum developer ecosystem is working on four aspects to strengthen its post-quantum readiness:

• Validator BLS signatures, which cover deposit contracts
• KZG commitments behind data availability
• ECDSA signatures that guard ordinary accounts
• Zero-knowledge proof systems used by rollups

EIP-8141, another proposal to migrate users to quantum-safe signatures, is under consideration for the Hegotá upgrade and is expected to handle account-level protection through native account abstraction.

Quantum readiness has been a 2026 priority

The Ethereum Foundation started January 2026 by naming a dedicated post-quantum team. Coratger, a co-author of Wedderburn’s deposit-contract draft, is a leader on that team.

The Foundation attached a $1 million Poseidon Prize to hardening a hash function, on top of an earlier $1 million Proximity Prize. Justin Drake described all those efforts as a “top strategic priority” at the time.

Core L1 quantum upgrades are targeted for around 2029, a date ethereum.org and Cryptopolitan both describe as a planning goal that could still move.

For now, the draft needs sign-off. The Foundation’s bot lists it as awaiting one more editor review, and an editor has asked that its placeholder number be reassigned to 8394 before it can advance.