Ethereum Sets December 2029 Deadline to Beat Quantum Computers

The Ethereum Foundation has announced a hard deadline of December 2029 to make its network resistant to quantum computing attacks. This deadline is sooner than expected, and it puts Ethereum on the same timeline as major tech companies like Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft.

However, this upgrade won't happen with the next fork, codenamed Hegotá, which is expected around 2027. The Foundation has warned that Hegotá is not the post-quantum fork and that five more hard forks are needed to make Ethereum quantum-resistant.

The current plan calls for replacing validators' BLS signatures with leanXMSS, a hash-based scheme, as it doesn't fall to quantum attacks like elliptic curve math does. This change requires a tight schedule, with almost no room for delay, and the Foundation has warned that missing a beat could slip the deadline.

The research behind this plan has changed significantly since 2026, when a team from Caltech, Oratomic, and UC Berkeley published a paper showing that Shor's algorithm could crack elliptic curve cryptography with as few as 10,000 to 26,000 qubits. This is much lower than previous estimates of millions of qubits.