Ethereum Foundation launches dedicated post-quantum security team

The Ethereum Foundation has made post-quantum security a central focus of the network’s long-term roadmap and announced a dedicated Post Quantum (PQ) team, to be led by cryptographic engineer Thomas Coratger with support from a cryptographer known as Emile, crypto researcher Justin Drake said.

Drake wrote that "after years of quiet R&D, EF management has officially declared PQ security a top strategic priority," adding, "It's now 2026, timelines are accelerating. Time to go full PQ." He described leanVM, a minimalist zero-knowledge proof virtual machine, as a core building block of Ethereum’s post-quantum strategy.

Near-term steps outlined by Drake include a biweekly developer session on post-quantum transactions starting next month led by Ethereum researcher Antonio Sanso, with a focus on user-facing protections such as protocol-level cryptographic tools, account abstraction pathways and longer-term work on aggregating transaction signatures using leanVM.

The Foundation is also backing the push with new funding: a $1 million Poseidon Prize to strengthen the Poseidon hash function and a separate $1 million Proximity Prize. On the engineering front, Drake said multi-client post-quantum consensus development networks are already live, with participating teams coordinating through weekly interoperability calls.

Key Topics

Crypto, Ethereum Foundation, Thomas Coratger, Post-quantum Cryptography, Leanvm, Poseidon Hash