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Solana and Anza, the company building core parts of its infrastructure, put forward Quantumglow on Oct. 22, a proposed post-quantum adaptation of the Alpenglow consensus upgrade, Ambcrypto reported. Neither announced an activation date. Crypto.news, which covered the same proposal, said neither announcement supplied a deployment date or identified a Quantumglow-specific Solana Improvement Document.
The pitch follows the mainnet activation of Alpenglow, which Ambcrypto describes as delivering an 85x improvement in transaction finality. Crypto.news reported that the Solana Foundation’s upgrade page lists Alpenglow as live after activation in epoch 1064 on Oct. 21, with a finality target of about 150 milliseconds against 12.8 seconds for TowerBFT.
Also read: Solana Cuts Target Block Time to 200ms at Epoch 1053
Key facts
- Quantumglow would replace BLS signatures used by validators with hash-based signatures, and ED25519 signatures used for wallet and app transfers with Falcon signing, per Ambcrypto.
- Anza published its Quantumglow overview on July 30, naming Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer as authors and pointing to Section 5 of the updated Alpenglow whitepaper, according to Crypto.news.
- Ambcrypto reports Solana holds an ‘F’ rating for post-quantum readiness because it does not yet use post-quantum signatures across transactions, peer-to-peer transfers and consensus.
- Crypto.news reports the Foundation records Alpenglow consensus starting at slot 459,653,000, after a genesis block certified by votes from 446 of 654 validators.
- Solana Developers presented the proposal in an Oct. 22 video post, and Solana’s main account said the network has been early in quantum readiness and remains ahead in its preparation, Crypto.news reported.
What changes at the signature layer
The proposal targets two schemes that both rest on elliptic curve cryptography. At consensus, validators use BLS signatures, which Ambcrypto describes as heavy and slow. For swaps and transfers between wallets and apps such as Phantom, the chain uses the faster ED25519 scheme. Quantumglow would move validators to hash-based signatures and wallets to Falcon, a quantum-proof scheme Ambcrypto groups with Dilithium among the most widely used. The stated aim is post-quantum security without giving up the 0.15-second finality figure Ambcrypto cites.
Crypto.news adds detail on the design obstacles. Anza’s July overview identifies two: post-quantum signatures take more space, and the compact signature aggregation used to prove validator agreement has no comparable ready replacement under the researchers’ requirements. The authors propose Ax, short for Alpenglow XMSS, a hash-based scheme tailored to the protocol, with validators exchanging and caching one-time public-key material in advance. For block authentication, Anza describes a signed commitment covering the block payload, which removes the need to attach a large post-quantum signature to every piece of block data.
Also read: Solana Activates Alpenglow, Targeting 150ms Finality
A companion paper from Kniep, Jakub Sliwinski and Wattenhofer, submitted July 20, moves certificates from messages sent across the network to events recorded locally. Crypto.news reports each message stays a constant size regardless of node count, although total communication grows quadratically, and notes the performance claim concerns a proposed design rather than a measured mainnet result.
Anza’s earlier warning and Bitcoin’s tack
Anza’s April 27 security assessment, attributed by Crypto.news to Max Resnick and Sam Kim, identified distinct quantum vulnerabilities in accounts, block propagation, consensus and user-defined programs, warning that an attacker able to break Ed25519 could forge account signatures. That assessment made no commitment to a single post-quantum scheme. Crypto.news also documented April 28 testing of early Falcon implementations by Anza and Firedancer, described at the time as an option for possible future activation.
Ambcrypto places the stakes at $2.7 trillion, or 99.7% of the crypto market, still dependent on classical signatures. It reports Google has set an internal post-quantum deadline of 2029, that Quantus, Tezos and Algorand are quantum-ready, and that Bitcoin and Ethereum have yet to agree on which post-quantum signatures to adopt. Crypto.news notes Bitcoin’s BIP-360 would introduce Pay-to-Merkle-Root outputs through a soft fork, removing the key-path spend used by Taproot; its authors separate protection of long-exposed public keys from attacks during confirmation, which they say may need post-quantum signatures in a separate proposal.
Why it matters
Consensus signatures protect the chain’s agreement on which blocks exist, while wallet signatures protect user funds, so a migration touches both infrastructure operators and everyday holders. Solana’s advantage, if the design holds, is keeping high-speed finality through the transition rather than trading performance for security. Crypto.news notes the Foundation’s guidance says ordinary users do not need to change how they sign, send or approve transactions under the Alpenglow migration, and that Alpenglow leaves transaction execution, programs and fee mechanics unchanged. Ambcrypto frames the proposal as evidence that Alpenglow can absorb post-quantum signatures without losing speed, and quotes Solana Chief Product Officer Vibhu Norby calling Anza’s cryptography team world class, while Jacob Creech described the plan as straightforward with no loss of speed.
What to watch
The publication of a Quantumglow-specific SIMD is the concrete missing step, since Crypto.news reports none was identified alongside the Oct. 22 explainer. Also watch for detail on account migration and auditing of the Ax scheme, and for whether Solana commits to a calendar target as other networks approach Google’s internal 2029 deadline.
Reported by ambcrypto.com.
Sources: AMBCrypto, Crypto.news