Overview
- Ripple, which published a four‑phase roadmap on Monday, set a 2028 goal to shift the XRP Ledger to quantum‑safe cryptography.
- Phase 2 testing in the first half of 2026 is already active, with Ripple and Project Eleven benchmarking NIST‑standard algorithms and piloting a custody wallet, with ML‑DSA signatures already running on AlphaNet.
- An emergency “Q‑Day” plan would block today’s classical signatures and use zero‑knowledge proofs so account owners can prove control and move funds to quantum‑safe accounts.
- In the second half of 2026, Ripple plans hybrid post‑quantum and elliptic‑curve signatures on Devnet so developers can gauge larger signature sizes, higher verification costs, and throughput effects before any mainnet change.
- Ripple cites Google Quantum AI’s lower attack resource estimates and the “harvest now, decrypt later” risk, and it points to XRPL’s native key rotation and seed‑based keys to ease a network‑wide migration for wallets, custodians, and validators.