Tezos Launches Quantumnet Post-Quantum Testnet

Insider Brief

• Tezos engineering teams have launched Quantumnet, an experimental public testnet for testing post-quantum consensus and cryptographic components.
• Quantumnet replaces or tests alternatives for quantum-vulnerable parts of Tezos, including randomness generation, attestation aggregation and the Data Availability Layer.
• Developers and Tezos bakers can run the testnet and provide feedback as teams work toward a potential post-quantum protocol amendment for mainnet.

PRESS RELEASE — Engineering teams in the Tezos ecosystem have successfully launched Quantumnet, an experimental post-quantum testnet that previews an early post-quantum version of the Tezos network. Developers at Nomadic Labs, Trilitech, alongside other contributors, collaborated on the code for the experimental environment, which is designed to let network validators (called bakers in the Tezos ecosystem) and researchers run post-quantum consensus code for the first time. While not intended for production use, Quantumnet is publicly available to anyone who would like to run it, and represents the first milestone towards a fully post-quantum instance of Tezos running on mainnet.

Recent developments in AI and quantum computing have greatly accelerated the threat that quantum computing poses to current cryptography standards. Quantum error correction has crossed a key milestone: as quantum processors scale up, logical error rates are now falling exponentially rather than compounding, with some experiments showing error rates roughly halving with each step up in scale. At the same time, large language models (LLMs), which are already highly capable at writing and optimizing code, are increasingly being used to design and refine quantum algorithms themselves, further compressing the timeline. Google itself has set a 2029 deadline to fully migrate its systems to post-quantum cryptography, underscoring the urgency for developers of decentralized networks such as blockchains.