The Solana Foundation recently announced that it has partnered with post-quantum cryptography security company Project Eleven to conduct practical tests of its "quantum-resistant transaction" technology on the Solana testnet, and claims that the design is practically feasible in terms of performance and scalability.
To address quantum security risks, testing has officially begun.
Solana stated that Project Eleven has completed a comprehensive quantum computing threat assessment for the Solana ecosystem. Based on this, they have actually built a working Solana testnet and implemented post-quantum digital signature technology as an experimental verification to address the risks of quantum computers in advance.
Test results reveal that end-to-end resistance to quantum trading is feasible.
Solana points out that the testnet's implementation results show:
"End-to-end quantum-resistant transactions are technically feasible and scalable."
This claim has garnered attention because post-quantum encryption is widely considered to require more computational resources than current mainstream encryption algorithms, potentially impacting transaction efficiency and system load. Solana has not yet disclosed the specific post-quantum encryption standard used in its testnet.
NIST has developed post-quantum encryption standards, and the layout of technology and encryption industries has begun.
At the institutional level, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) officially approved three post-quantum encryption standards in August 2024: FIPS 203, FIPS 204, and FIPS 205, which are regarded as the official foundational specifications for future quantum-resistant encryption.
This has prompted major technology and crypto ecosystems to begin assessing the feasibility and cost of implementing related technologies in real-world systems.
The trade-offs in efficiency are obvious, and safety upgrades come with high costs.
In 2024, network infrastructure provider Cloudflare conducted a performance comparison between FIPS 204, the Ed25519 currently used by Solana, and the traditional RSA-2048.
Test results show that FIPS 204 costs nearly five times more to sign than Ed25519, but is about twice as fast at verifying. RSA-2048 is slower to sign than the other two, but slightly faster at verifying than FIPS 204.
The results show that post-quantum encryption still involves a clear trade-off between security and performance.
Divergent views across industries: Quantum threat tests on-chain governance capabilities
Matt Sorg, VP of Technology at the Solana Foundation, stated that Solana's mission is to "protect global digital assets from quantum risks," a stance aligned with the direction of most mainstream crypto ecosystems.
However, the industry has not yet reached a consensus on the timeline for the quantum threat. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has pointed out that the probability of a quantum computer breaking existing encryption systems before 2030 is about 20%.
However, cryptographer Adam Back believes that Bitcoin faces a substantial quantum threat, which may still take 20 to 40 years. Furthermore, James Check, founder of Checkonchain, points out that quantum-resistant technology itself is not the biggest challenge; the real challenge lies in Bitcoin's governance mechanism, which struggles to reach a consensus on asset migration and freezing. If older, unmigrated assets are compromised in the future, it could impact the market's supply structure.
(With the quantum era approaching, can zero-knowledge proofs become Bitcoin's last line of defense?)
This article, "Solana Launches Quantum-Resistant Transaction Test, Partnering with Project Eleven to Verify Feasibility on Testnet," first appeared on ABMedia, a ABMedia .
