Layer 1 blockchain Sui has announced plans to introduce quantum-resistant security infrastructure on its mainnet within the year, deploying two post-quantum signature schemes approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The initiative addresses the emerging threat that sufficiently powerful quantum computers could compromise the elliptic-curve cryptography securing most blockchain accounts today.
The upgrade will integrate ML-DSA-65 as a native protocol signature scheme for regular accounts, while the hash-based SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s will be implemented within Move smart contracts to protect high-value vaults. Because Sui keys are derived deterministically from a seed, users will be able to transition to quantum-safe keys using their existing recovery phrases without creating new accounts.
Additionally, Sui’s live address alias feature allows existing accounts to update their authorization keys directly, eliminating the need to transfer assets elsewhere. The network is targeting mainnet deployment of quantum-safe vaults this year, with native ML-DSA-65 accounts expected on testnet by year-end and mainnet authentication scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. These timelines remain provisional pending independent audits and testnet feedback.
The urgency behind the upgrade stems from a fundamental property of public blockchains: public keys are exposed permanently from the moment an account transacts, enabling “harvest-now-forge-later” attacks where adversaries collect encrypted data today to decrypt once quantum hardware matures. In March 2026, Google Quantum AI estimated that recovering a private key from an exposed public key could be accomplished in minutes on a fault-tolerant machine with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits.
Regulatory timelines have also accelerated. While NIST originally planned to deprecate classical algorithms by 2030 and disallow them by 2035, Executive Order 14412—signed in June 2026—requires federal agencies to adopt post-quantum key establishment by the end of 2030 and post-quantum digital signatures by the end of 2031. Sui’s architecture was designed for cryptographic agility, allowing new signature schemes to be added without altering consensus or existing network state. This design choice enables the integration as a routine protocol update rather than a fundamental rebuild, positioning the network to adapt as quantum capabilities advance.
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