Hacken joins the Quantum Alliance
Hacken is a founding member of the Quantum Alliance, an open standards body formed by nine blockchain organizations to define post-quantum readiness for networks, wallets, and infrastructure. The Alliance will establish criteria for testing and verifying quantum-resistance claims and develop standards for interoperability as networks migrate to post-quantum cryptography.
Katina Messinis, MENA Security & Compliance Partner at Hacken, joins the Alliance as a founding contributor alongside CEOs, CTOs, and founders from Quantus, Postquant Labs, Midnight Foundation, Keystone, American Fortress, Intmax, Abelian, and The Vault.
Hacken will focus on verification, contributing to the open test criteria and benchmarks that allow teams to assess their implementations against the standard rather than rely on unverified readiness claims. All Alliance outputs will be published openly, enabling projects to adopt the standards directly and giving anyone a common basis for evaluating quantum-resistance claims.
Hacken brings more than nine years of experience in blockchain security, compliance, and regulatory assurance. The company has secured institutional capital across more than 30 blockchain ecosystems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Avalanche, Polygon, Stellar, Hedera, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
Why “Quantum-Resistant” Needs a Definition
Let’s look at the example: There are two public assessments that reach different conclusions about Ethereum’s readiness for quantum computing. One analysis by the qLABS Quantum Vulnerability Index ranked Ethereum second among prepared networks, citing its roadmap and active research. The second scorecard from migration.fail gives Ethereum an F-readiness tier, considering only cryptographic protections already deployed for the rating.
Both assessments apply their own criteria, but neither provides exchanges, custodians, developers, and asset holders with a common reference point. A network can describe itself as quantum-resistant without a shared understanding of which parts of its system the claim covers or what evidence supports it.
A few words about quantum threat:
Nearly every major blockchain relies on elliptic-curve cryptography for account signatures. Once an account signs a transaction, its public key becomes visible on the public ledger. For some address types, the public key is exposed from the moment the address is created. Classical computers cannot feasibly derive the private key from the public key, but a sufficiently capable quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could do so, potentially allowing an attacker to take control of the associated funds.
Almost all of the roughly $2.9 trillion crypto market still relies on classical signatures. An estimated 6.04 million BTC, representing 30.2% of the total supply, is classified as quantum-exposed at rest. The same cryptographic systems also protect stablecoin minting keys, governance contracts, bridges, and oracle feeds. A compromised privileged key could therefore affect multiple platforms.
No existing quantum computer can carry out this attack. However, two developments have changed the evidence base: estimates of when such a computer could arrive have moved closer, and estimates of the resources required to break current cryptography have fallen.
Why now?
Timelines have tightened. Since early 2025, the Quantum Doom Clock, a model developed by Alliance contributors Richard T. Carback III and Colton Dillion, has identified March 2028 as an early potential window for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. In April, Scott Aaronson relayed the view of leading hardware experts that a machine capable of breaking deployed cryptographic systems could arrive around 2029.
Resource estimates have fallen. In March, Google Quantum AI, working with researchers from the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford, found that breaking the elliptic-curve cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ether, and most major cryptocurrencies could require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits—roughly one-twentieth of earlier estimates. In September, IonQ estimated that a fault-tolerant trapped-ion quantum computer with approximately 20,000 physical qubits could solve Bitcoin’s secp256k1 problem in about 26 days per attempt.
NIST finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024. However, no single organization can mandate that a live blockchain adopt them. Migrating a network’s signature scheme requires extensive engineering, coordination, and testing, making it a multiyear undertaking.
What the Alliance Will Publish
The Alliance’s first major deliverable will be a public definition of quantum readiness covering five areas:
- Transaction signatures
- Key management
- Consensus
- Zero-knowledge proof systems
- Peer-to-peer connections
Alongside the definition, the Alliance will publish open test criteria and benchmarks that teams can run against their own implementations. It will also develop reference designs for migration, addressing exposed keys, dormant accounts, and the larger transactions that post-quantum signatures can produce.
Work will begin across four groups:
- Blockchain migration: How live networks can migrate funds and keys to post-quantum schemes, including accounts whose public keys are already exposed.
- Post-quantum zero-knowledge systems: How to evaluate and benchmark post-quantum proof systems.
- Wallet security: How users and custodians can generate, store, and sign transactions with post-quantum keys.
- Cross-chain compatibility: Interoperability specifications to help wallets, bridges, and hardware signers handle post-quantum keys consistently.
The Alliance follows the Internet Engineering Task Force’s open standards model and will welcome individual contributors. Proposals will advance through public evidence, rough consensus, and working implementations. Corporate size and token holdings will carry no voting weight.
Hacken’s Role in the Alliance
The founding members represent several layers involved in a post-quantum migration, including base-layer protocols, privacy networks, rollups, hardware signers, addressing, custody, and quantum computing infrastructure. Hacken brings an independent security and assurance perspective to this work, focusing on how claims about these systems can be tested and verified.
That distinction matters. A definition without test criteria cannot be independently evaluated. Without a way to verify it, a quantum-readiness claim remains an assertion. Hacken will contribute to the standard’s verification framework: the evidence required to substantiate a claim, the methods used to assess an implementation against the definition, and the information a verification result should communicate.
This work also addresses a category of risk that already accounts for a substantial share of institutional losses. Shor’s algorithm targets cryptographic keys, not smart contract logic. In Hacken’s Q3 2026 report, 1.18B of losses across 107 incidents were distributed between access control and signer/withdrawal infrastructure (40%) and contract logic exploits (48%). Quantum exposure extends an existing security risk category rather than introducing an entirely separate one.
Hacken will also bring the post-quantum security discussion to TRUST Summit 2027, taking place on March 29, 2027, at Nasdaq Tower in New York, immediately ahead of the Digital Asset Summit.
The Alliance’s criteria are written for engineers, but the decisions they inform—what to list, custody, underwrite, and permit—are made by custody leaders, risk committees, and regulators. These stakeholders do not always engage directly with technical specifications. TRUST will bring technical contributors and institutional decision-makers together while the standard is still being drafted, allowing institutional requirements to inform its development rather than surface as objections after publication.
This is also where a technical standard begins to influence operational decisions and procurement requirements.
Founding Members of the Quantum Alliance
- Quantus is a proof-of-work blockchain that uses NIST’s ML-DSA post-quantum signature standard from its first block.
- Postquant Labs develops Quip Network, a decentralized marketplace connecting users with quantum computing hardware.
- Midnight Foundation supports Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain built around zero-knowledge proofs and linked to Cardano.
- Keystone develops open-source, air-gapped hardware wallets that sign transactions using QR codes.
- American Fortress builds Send-to-Name, a system of human-readable payment addresses with quantum-resistant signing.
- Intmax operates a stateless zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum designed for low-cost, private payments.
- Abelian operates a privacy-focused Layer 1 blockchain secured with lattice-based post-quantum cryptography.
- The Vault is building post-quantum cryptography (PQC) custody environments for banks and enterprises holding digital assets.
- Hacken is a security and assurance partner for financial institutions and the infrastructure providers they rely on.
