Quantum computing has been Crypto’s slow moving problem for years now. Everyone is in agreement that the threat itself is not in dispute. If a large enough quantum computer gets built, the math protecting wallets stops working. What is in dispute is how to move hundreds of millions of wallets to new addresses before that happens. A new paper published by blockchain security firm AmericanFortress argues that the moving step was never needed and users would not need to rotate keys or change wallet addresses. 

Address Migration Was Always the Bottleneck 

A quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can derive a private key directly out of the matching public key. This basically puts every crypto wallet out there today at risk of being exposed. The fix here would be to swap assets into a post-quantum signature scheme. Doing this, however, would mean changing the public key format, which essentially means address migration across every participating network. 

The fact is, some coins cannot migrate. Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC for instance hasn’t budged since 2010. Whoever holds the keys to the millions more sitting in dormant wallets isn’t reading migration notices either. 

Prove You Know the Seed, Don’t Sign With It

Here is what the paper describes, in plain terms. When you set up a wallet you write down a seed phrase. Every address in that wallet gets generated from those words. The seed is the root and the addresses are branches off it. 

The proposal, named ZKPoSP for Zero-Knowledge Proof of Seed Provenance, drops the signing step and has the wallet prove it knows the seed instead. It does that with zero knowledge proof, a way of showing a statement is true without revealing what makes it true. The wallet demonstrates it knows the seed behind the address without ever exposing the seed. Nodes check the proof and clear the transaction. 

Your address stays exactly the same. The authors write that the method needs no address migration and no key registration. The public key stops being the weak point because it is no longer what authorizes a spend. 

A second piece, QBIP32, deals with what comes next. Chains use different math underneath, Bitcoin and Ethereum on secp256k1 and Solana on Ed25519. The paper argues existing standards only produce a usable quantum-safe proof as a side effect of their own key format, with no single method that works across curves, and offers QBIP32 as one derivation scheme that covers any of them. Existing wallets do not need it. The paper says today’s standards, including BIP32 and SLIP-10, already support the proofs on their own. 

What Still Has to Happen

The paper calls its quantum protection conjectured, not proven. No quantum computer exists yet to test it against.

Deployment is the wider gap. Nodes have to upgrade before any network can enforce it. Wallets have to ship the proving code. Users do nothing only after both sides move first, and AmericanFortress holds a patent filing and is licensing the SDK, which gives it a commercial stake in that adoption.

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