Ripple lays out a four-phase plan to quantum-proof the XRP Ledger by 2028

[Keira85]

Ripple is preparing the XRP Ledger for a future point researchers call Q-Day, when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive private keys from the public keys that become visible on-chain once a wallet signs its first transaction. Senior director of engineering Ayo Akinyele said the goal isn't to wait until quantum computing becomes an immediate threat, but to let critical financial infrastructure evolve well before that point without disrupting the systems, assets and users that depend on it

The roadmap runs in four phases: assessing vulnerabilities and testing quantum-resistant algorithms against real XRPL workloads, running old and new security systems in parallel during a transition period, and maintaining an emergency response plan in case the threat develops faster than expected. Ripple's applied cryptography team is working with Project Eleven to test NIST-standardized schemes like ML-DSA, also known as Dilithium, against actual ledger workloads, since post-quantum signatures can run many times larger than today's, raising real practical costs in storage, bandwidth and transaction throughput that need to be solved alongside the pure cryptography

The coverage notably points to a stark recent data point underlining the urgency, an Anthropic AI model reportedly cut the computational work needed to break a leading post-quantum signature candidate by a factor of 67 million in a single month, while Bitcoin and Ethereum separately published their own migration plans around the same time. Full production-ready post-quantum readiness for XRPL is targeted no later than 2028. Curious what people think about blockchain projects racing to migrate ahead of an uncertain but potentially fast-approaching threat, does 2028 sound like a comfortable runway or a genuinely tight deadline

Ripple Is Preparing Xrp Ledger For Quantum Computers Before Q Day Arriveswww.coindesk.com

[IronFist66]

A 67 million times reduction in one month from a single AI model is honestly the number that should be reshaping every blockchain team's internal timeline right now, that's the kind of result that makes a 2028 target feel less comfortable than it did a year ago

[DudleyBoy]

Post-quantum signatures being many times larger than current ones is an underappreciated practical hurdle, this isn't purely a cryptography problem, it's also a real engineering problem around storage costs and network throughput at scale

[Myles]

Testing against real XRPL workloads rather than pure theoretical benchmarks is a meaningful distinction, plenty of cryptographic research stays abstract right up until someone actually tries running it against genuine production scale traffic

[StringTheory32]

Curious how XRPL's validator and custody ecosystem coordination actually works in practice for something this disruptive, a protocol level cryptography change needs buy-in across independent operators, not just Ripple's own internal engineering team

[WhatUQuant]

Worth noting Bitcoin and Ethereum publishing their own migration plans around the same time suggests this has become genuinely industry wide urgency rather than one company being unusually cautious

[NeutrinoX74]

Every wallet that's ever signed a transaction already has its public key exposed on-chain, that's a genuinely huge existing attack surface that migration work has to address retroactively, not just protect going forward for new accounts

[DrewMcIntyre]

Running old and new security systems in parallel during the transition is the genuinely sensible approach here, a hard cutover on something this consequential would risk locking legitimate users out just as easily as it locks out attackers