Odaily Planet Daily reports: On Tuesday, the Ethereum Foundation released a new roadmap outlining how its development team is preparing for the threat of quantum computing. The Foundation’s quantum team expects a series of initial upgrades to be completed by 2029, primarily involving four key hard forks.
The foundation states that quantum computing will eventually break the public-key cryptography that secures ownership, authentication, and consensus in all digital systems, but this threat is not expected to materialize immediately. Researchers on the foundation’s quantum team anticipate that quantum computing with cryptographic capabilities will take 8 to 12 years to emerge.
Among the four hard forks, the "I" fork will provide quantum-safe public keys to network validators, and the "J" fork will reduce the gas fees for verifying quantum-safe signatures; both upgrades have been considered for inclusion in the upcoming Hegota fork later this year. The "L" fork will compress the network state into zero-knowledge proofs, and the "M" fork will protect Layer 2 networks from quantum threats.
Researchers say that Layer 1 protocol upgrades can be completed by 2029, but a full execution layer migration will require several additional years beyond that. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated quantum team in January this year, and developer testnets began testing certain quantum features in March.