Tron has post-quantum signatures on its Nile testnet, Starknet is voting on leaving Ethereum, and Bitcoin's response is still at the draft stage.
Tron has moved post-quantum signatures onto a test network. Starknet is voting on whether to walk away from Ethereum to finish the same work. Bitcoin is still at the draft stage.
The difference isn't appetite. It's architecture. Tron and Starknet can change how transactions are signed without redesigning how coins are held. For Bitcoin, the harder question is what to do about the coins already sitting in addresses whose public keys are exposed. TIP-899, a Tron proposal, counts more than 6.9 million BTC in that position.
Tron DAO says it has deployed end-to-end post-quantum signature support on its Nile testnet. Its general counsel, John Hurston, pointed to that deployment at the 5th INTERPOL New Technologies Forum in Vienna on September 29 and 30.
The design lives in TIP-899, a draft Standards Track proposal created on June 30. It adds post-quantum signature support at the protocol layer and enables two lattice-based algorithms first: Falcon-512 (FN_DSA_512) and Dilithium2 (ML_DSA_44). Together they cover four jobs: transactions, block production by Super Representatives, node relay handshakes, and the Tron Virtual Machine.
Each algorithm needs its own on-chain governance proposal, and both are disabled by default. That makes the Nile deployment a rehearsal rather than a live switch, and it's the part of this story that has actually shipped.
Why bother? TIP-899 answers bluntly: ECDSA, the scheme Tron uses today, "can be broken by a quantum computer running Shor's algorithm in minutes." The same document notes that Bitcoin alone has more than 6.9 million BTC, roughly a third of total supply, in addresses with exposed public keys.
Tron's scale is why a signature change there reaches beyond its own users. TRON DAO says it hosts the largest circulating supply of USDT, above $94 billion, and reports more than 406 million user accounts, over 15 billion transactions and more than $28 billion in total value locked as of October 2026. It also says cumulative transfer volume recently passed $30 trillion.
Tron founder Justin Sun said in a post on Saturday that the cryptography is live on testnet and that the team is "ready to bring quantum resistance to mainnet at any time." He described Tron as set to be "one of the few major blockchains that is quantum-resistant before Q-Day", the point at which quantum computers can break today's security standards.
Starknet starts from a stronger position on paper. Its proofs are built on hash-based STARKs, which StarkWare says keeps quantum-vulnerable cryptography out of the account and settlement layers, because STARKs depend on collision-resistant hash functions rather than elliptic-curve arithmetic. Native account abstraction means a post-quantum wallet can be deployed today without a protocol-level change. S2morrow has demonstrated one, a Falcon-512 account implementation written in Cairo, and OpenZeppelin has begun work on a post-quantum account contract.
StarkWare published a three-phase roadmap for the rest on June 30, 2026. Phase one replaces Pedersen hashing with BLAKE2 across the state commitment, contract address derivation and OS config hash layers, and plans consensus signatures on-chain using post-quantum schemes such as Falcon-512. Phase two covers migrating existing contracts.
Phase three is the awkward one. It covers two surfaces tied to Ethereum: the Cairo VM's secp256k1/r1 syscalls, which support the bridge, and blob data availability anchored by a KZG commitment. Both are quantum-vulnerable, and StarkWare says they "will be resolved as Ethereum's migration progresses."
That dependency is what the current vote is about. The Starknet forum frames it as a question: should Starknet become an independent post-quantum L1? The reasoning is simple. The parts Starknet controls can be quantum-resistant soon. The parts that depend on Ethereum are tied to Ethereum's timeline. An L1 removes that tie.
The poll is non-binding and runs for seven days. If it returns a yes, the next step is a research effort leading to more detailed proposals, not a transition. The forum is explicit that STRK remains the token, with no new token, and that bridges from Ethereum to Starknet stay open. StarkWare adds that all protocol-level changes go through Starknet's governance process, and that no timeline or outcome is guaranteed.
StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson opened the discussion, listing three requirements for a future-proofed chain: the right cryptography, crypto agility and becoming an L1. The network has floated 2027 as a target.
Ethereum's own post-quantum page explains why that matters. It says a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is not believed to be imminent, but that migrating a global protocol takes years and must begin well before the threat arrives. Its current assessment: L1 protocol upgrades could be complete by 2029, with full execution-layer migration taking additional years. Most engineering roadmaps, the page notes, place cryptographic relevance in the early-to-mid 2030s, and breaking elliptic-curve cryptography would require thousands of stable logical qubits.
Solana's answer so far is patience, with one exception. Anza and Firedancer, the teams behind its two validator clients, worked separately and reached the same conclusion: a post-quantum signature scheme with compact signatures, built for a high-throughput chain. Both settled on Falcon, and both have built an initial implementation.
The plan that follows is staged. Keep researching and keep evaluating Falcon and its alternatives. If quantum becomes a credible threat, adopt a post-quantum scheme for new wallets. Then migrate existing wallets to it.
One piece is already live. Solana says Blueshift's Winternitz Vault has been in place for more than two years, and it counts it among the few quantum-resistant primitives in use on a major blockchain today. Solana also says Google Quantum AI cited the vault in a whitepaper.
Bitcoin's response is different in kind: proposals, not a deployment. BIP-360, from developer Hunter Beast, would add an address type called P2QRH, short for pay-to-quantum-resistant-hash, that commits to a hash of quantum-resistant signature data instead of exposing a public key. It's proposed as a soft fork.
Coinbase, which holds bitcoin for clients, has published its own view. Start preparing now rather than waiting for the risk to arrive, and handle the question of lost coins separately. Consensus changes and ecosystem migrations can take years, the exchange notes, so work needs to begin "well ahead of any CRQC announcement", meaning a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
Coinbase points to two proposals, P2MR (BIP-360) and P2TRv2, as flexible enough to carry new post-quantum signature types without rebuilding the system. It backs a transition in which active wallets could adopt hybrid signatures through a "1-of-2" setup, spendable with either a traditional ECDSA or Schnorr key or a post-quantum one.
StarkWare's roadmap makes the case against Bitcoin's current design in blunter terms, arguing that its UTXO model carries elliptic-curve vulnerabilities when funds are sent to addresses that have already been spent from. That's a competitor's argument, but the exposure figure is not in dispute: TIP-899 puts it at more than 6.9 million BTC.
The immediate next step belongs to Starknet. Its seven-day poll is non-binding, and a yes only buys research rather than a migration. The rest is a testnet, a vault and a set of drafts, which is where post-quantum crypto on the big chains actually stands.
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