Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake outlined a December 2028 goal for completing Ethereum’s “full post-quantum and post-AI transition” at Devcon 8’s opening ceremony, advancing a faster timetable than the Foundation team’s published 2029 protocol-upgrade target.
The Foundation said the work covers all three Ethereum protocol layers: validator signatures on the consensus layer, data availability on the data layer, and account authentication on the execution layer. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could recover private keys from exposed public keys, enabling theft and impersonation, the Foundation’s post-quantum team explains.
“Our hope is that by December 2028 we’ll be able to wrap up the full post-quantum and post-AI transition,” Drake said, according to the official Devcon account. The organizer quoted him allowing 24 months to ship three further forks.
The proposed sequence comprises Glamsterdam, Hegotá and the provisionally named I* and J* forks, according to Ethereum developer-tooling lead 0xRahul’s account of the presentation. Conference attendee Bob Summerwill identified J* as the proposed post-quantum endpoint.
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The earlier post-quantum team roadmap says L1 protocol upgrades could be completed by 2029, with full execution-layer migration taking additional years. Its published sequence places a validator key registry at I, signature-verification features at J, consensus proofs and leanVM at L, and post-quantum blob handling at M.
Drake’s proposed J* endpoint would therefore bring protocol-wide protection into an earlier fork. It is a goal, not an agreed activation schedule: the Strawmap describes itself as a work in progress rather than a prediction, and the post-quantum team says final upgrades are determined through Ethereum’s open governance processes.
From Roadmap to Running Code
A key component is leanVM, a minimal proof-generating virtual machine intended to make larger post-quantum signatures practical by aggregating their verification. Its public codebase includes implementations and benchmarks for validator signatures, user signatures and data availability.
The Foundation said leanVM had been “formally-verified end-to-end” in the preceding few days. However, the code repository still labels formal verification “in progress” and warns that leanVM is not yet production ready. The linked verification project also says no proof-system claim has landed and lists end-to-end theorems among its assurance goals.
For holders, a protocol upgrade and migration of an existing account remain different steps. As The Defiant previously reported, verifying alternative signatures in a smart contract does not automatically remove an existing account’s original signing key’s authority.
EIP-8141, a proposed native route to programmable transaction authorization and post-quantum signatures, remains labeled Draft. It would let account code define validation rather than requiring today’s elliptic-curve authentication.