Quantum Security, Quantum Cryptography

NIST-approved hash schemes are the key to quantum-safe wallets

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October 3, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Shor’s algorithm poses a surprisingly specific threat to cryptocurrency wallets. It can derive a private key from a public key that has already been exposed by transacting. This vulnerability isn’t theoretical, but tied to existing blockchain activity, prompting a search for security. Quip Accounts is currently addressing this issue by using SHRINCS, a hash-based signature scheme, as the security layer for smart accounts on chains like Ethereum. While QRL has signed every transaction with the XMSS hash-based scheme since June 2018, offering a functioning, though isolated, example of a post-quantum wallet for over six years.

Hash-Based Schemes Counter Elliptic-Curve Vulnerabilities

Hash-based schemes address a critical vulnerability in cryptocurrency security; the security of funds ultimately depends on the signature scheme used and what that scheme relies on for protection. Quip Accounts employs SHRINCS as a security layer for smart accounts on established blockchains such as Ethereum, allowing users to maintain asset control on their current chains, the company says. This approach prioritizes compatibility over minimizing transaction costs, as hash-based signatures are larger than their elliptic-curve counterparts, resulting in increased gas fees.

This trade-off represents a pragmatic solution for those unwilling to migrate assets to newer, quantum-safe blockchains, but it does not eliminate the cost of enhanced security. According to one source, the key question to ask when evaluating any wallet product is what signature scheme guards the funds and what its security rests on.

Its mainnet has signed every transaction with the hash-based XMSS scheme since June 2018, with no elliptic-curve fallback. Evaluating any solution requires assessing whether an implementation has undergone public audit and whether it protects existing assets or necessitates a transfer to a new platform. The urgency of this transition stems from existing exposure, not a future date of cryptographic failure, as tracked by quantumdoomclock.com.

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Avatar of Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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