Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Finance

Banks and regulators test quantum-safe digital asset transfers

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August 24, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Banks and regulators are now actively testing defenses against the future threat of quantum computing, with a new cross-jurisdictional pilot program focused on securing digital asset transfers. Convened by the Responsible Fintech Institute and technology partner Safeheron, the initiative centers on ML-DSA-65, the NIST FIPS 204 digital signature standard, and utilizes the NEAR testnet for on-chain activity.

“No single bank, vendor, or regulator solves this alone,” said Chia Hock Lai, Chairman of the Responsible Fintech Institute. By collaboratively testing a shared post-quantum architecture, participants aim to establish a transparent security reference for the entire financial industry.

Cross-Regional Pilot Evaluates Post-Quantum Digital Asset Transfers

Participating institutions are now actively testing a digital signature standard designed to withstand attacks from future quantum computers, utilizing the ML-DSA-65 protocol as defined by the NIST FIPS 204 standard. The initiative focuses on wallet generation and on-chain transfer activity, specifically leveraging the quantum-resistant NEAR testnet to simulate real-world conditions for digital asset transactions. Multiple jurisdictions are collaborating in this effort, with both banks and regulatory bodies involved in the testing process, signifying a coordinated international approach to bolstering financial security.

The pilot’s design incorporates a shared application environment, allowing for consistent conditions during multi-party computation signing, while regulators initially observe and later contribute to governance discussions. The urgency behind this initiative stems from the accelerating development of artificial intelligence and its potential to hasten the arrival of practical quantum computing capabilities.

Jag Foo, Chief Security & Policy Officer at Safeheron, stated that “AI is accelerating the pace of change and likely bringing the quantum threat closer to reality—quantum-ready infrastructure has never been more critical, and the time to act is now.” Safeheron intends to open-source the underlying protocol code, advocating for transparency and independent security audits to ensure accountability within the financial sector.

The results of this pilot, including research findings and protocol design, will be published in a whitepaper to facilitate broader industry learning and preparedness, reinforcing the collective effort to secure financial networks against emerging threats.

We welcome the industry’s initiative to identify a reliable protocol that safeguards digital asset transactions.

David Peters, Managing Director of the Gelephu Financial Services Office
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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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