Market Data 
Ripple has mapped out a four-phase plan to shield the $XRP Ledger from quantum computing threats, targeting a complete transition by 2028.
In blog post published on April 20, Ripple said that while the risk posed by quantum computing is not immediate, advances in quantum research have made it credible enough to require action now.
The initiative follows research from Google Quantum AI showing that the cryptographic foundations most blockchains rely on today are vulnerable to sufficiently powerful quantum machines.
There’s also the “harvest now, decrypt later” problem, according to Ripple. Bad actors can scrape publicly visible cryptographic data from blockchains today, store it, and wait for quantum hardware to catch up. For assets meant to be held for years or decades, that’s a real concern.
These risks warrant structured preparation across performance, storage, usability and protocol design, Ripple stated.
The four phases
The roadmap is organized around two concurrent objectives: maintaining XRPL’s operational integrity during transition and establishing contingency measures for an accelerated quantum threat scenario.
Phase 1 establishes a Quantum-Day response plan, under which the network would enforce a hard migration away from classical public-key signatures, with post-quantum zero-knowledge proofs enabling secure fund recovery for existing account holders.
Phase 2, covering the first half of 2026, will initiate formal experimentation with NIST-standardized quantum-resistant algorithms, benchmarking signature size, verification cost and throughput impact under real XRPL workload conditions.
Ripple is collaborating with Project Eleven on validator-level testing, Devnet benchmarking and a post-quantum custody wallet prototype to accelerate this phase.
Phase 3, scheduled for the second half of 2026, introduces hybrid deployment of post-quantum and existing elliptic curve signatures on Devnet, alongside exploration of post-quantum primitives for zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption relevant to tokenization use cases including Confidential Transfers for MPTs.
Phase 4 targets production-ready post-quantum cryptography through a new XRPL network amendment by 2028, with a focus on throughput optimization and validator coordination.
Ripple noted that XRPL’s native key rotation and seed-based key generation give it a structural head start over blockchains like Ethereum, where no equivalent migration tools exist at the protocol level.
Projects like QRL and Abelian took a quantum-resistant approach from the beginning, whereas others, including Algorand, Solana, and the XRPL, are working to incorporate quantum-safe features over time, according to Google researchers.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation has ramped up initiatives to strengthen its infrastructure against future quantum risks.
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