One Type of Post-Quantum Cryptography Is Most Popular. Why Is Crypto Trying Out Three?

**Charles Guillemet** (0:00)
At the end, there are like three main options. Either you don't do anything, and if you do that, as soon as there is a quantum computer capable of working cryptography, they will be stolen, and that creates like a liquidity problem, that creates a market problem, or you freeze them. You say that those coins cannot be spent by anyone anymore. And in this case, that can be seen as like a private property problem, like the people that are very strong on this one will be against this one. And the third option is the same. And if you do that, you don't have like a 21 million Bitcoin anymore, but something like 16 millions or something like this. Or there is a third option, which is all the coins that have not migrated, you freeze them, but not only you freeze them, you tail emit them on the consensus for Bitcoin. Instead of emitting only 1 million Bitcoin until 2176, you will emit like 4 to 5 million Bitcoin that were not migrated. So those are the three different options.

**Laura Shin** (1:11)
Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream, but quick note, it was pre-recorded just a few hours before. And now we'll take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Oneinch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from Oneinch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at oneinch.com/aqua.
Today's topic is preparing crypto to become quantum resistant. Here to discuss are Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger. Welcome, Illia and Charles.
Great to be here.
Yeah, excited to chat. You both have recent news about your respective projects making moves toward becoming quantum safe. You both have to obviously approach it from different directions. Charles from a hardware angle, Illia from the chain angle, which I'm guessing is probably more software related. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of everything that's going on, I think on my show, the last time we talked about quantum issues was a few months ago, and I know obviously this space changes pretty quickly. I would just love to hear you guys give an assessment of where the crypto industry is in terms of its work on making all of crypto quantum resistant especially because as people are probably well aware, last fall, there was a lot of criticism and concern going around about Bitcoin in particular not being ready in time, so I'd love to hear just what updates you have generally across all of crypto as well as even updates on the timeline that we're looking at. So Illia, do you want to start?

**Illia Polosukhin** (3:09)
Sure. Yeah. I think we've had quite a few updates over past eight months in the crypto space.
It started with acceleration of the quantum computing technology as well as algorithmic improvements on effectively recovering private keys out of public keys for the cryptography. And so that was a big moment, I think. I was like, um, April when there's a March, April when the paper out of Google came out, where they didn't even present the algorithm. They were so kind of concerned with that was this that they present the zero knowledge proof.

**Laura Shin** (3:57)
Yeah, this was the last time we covered that on the show.

**Illia Polosukhin** (4:00)
Yeah, the interesting thing since then happened that EigenLayer launched the competition for everybody's AI to compete and to find that algorithm. And they effectively found it and beat it within, I think, 48 hours. And since then, it's been running, kind of continuously improving. So, what this means is really the, like, historically, the, this Shnor algorithm, which kind of, this like, domicilous sword over cryptography.
Usually, it was like very far advanced, requires a lot of computing power from quantum computer. That can, was, keep coming closer and closer. Well, obviously, the quantum computing can continuously progress.
Now, we still don't have, like, a clear date, right? And I think Charles, I'll cite him as, like, you know, for past 20 years, everybody says it's going to be in five years.
And so, I think we're still kind of in, in, in similar-ish point, but at the same time, these five years feel, like, very different because there's so much investment, there's so much kind of interest, and we just have way better tools, right? There's AI now to do material science, to do this kind of physics that's required. And so, I think, like, generally, it feels a lot more real than ever before. And so, I think everybody is starting to take it seriously. I think there's a lot more conversation happening. There's now kind of a lot of research, and specifically, there has been already a photography that is kind of approved to be used for post-quantum. And the challenge for blockchain has been that it's usually pretty slow and pretty big, right? And so, kind of, how do we deal with that has been a question. Now, there is a lot of conversation. That's why, I mean, we want to be here. But specifically, maybe, like, from our side, about a month ago, we actually went to Mainnet with the first post-quantum signature support, allowing users to now hold assets on NEAR with post-quantum secure key. And so, this is, as far as I know, first time you are able to do that on major blockchain. And this enables, effectively, all the tooling and ecosystem to start supporting that, because it takes, actually, time from the blockchain support to perfectly propagate across the whole ecosystem. And we were working with Ledger to make sure we actually work on the same signature scheme and on the same tooling so that Ledger be the first hardware support as well for this.