As the team is finally back from Argentina and has had a little time to recover, we’re ready to tell you how it was. First of all, I’d like to personally thank the EF and the Argentinian Eth community for the effort they put into this. I organize events in my spare time and I know very well how hard it is. For an event of this magnitude, the organizational effort is herculean, to say the least. So kudos!
Next, I want to spend just a few words about Argentina: It’s a great place, and I loved every aspect of it. One of the best perks is meat (if you are a meat lover of course), and the fact (at least for us) that it is conveniently located in the Southern Hemisphere, so if you want a bit of extra summer during the winter, it’s a great place to consider. Besides this, the city architecture is great, the people are great, and the crypto community is incredible. Indeed, we had the pleasure of meeting a lot of Argentina-based crews and companies and their technical expertise was absolutely world-class (yes, I’m looking at you Lambda Class!).
For what concerns us more closely, let me begin by saying that
A lot of pants are now getting pooped.
You heard me well. Many, many people, technical and not, are now legitimately scared of the quantum threat to Web3 and to Ethereum in particular. While I don’t generally like to see people scared or discombobulated by sad emotions, this is actually a good thing. It means the quantum risk to blockchain infra has finally been taken seriously, and it was about time!
We listened to various talks, especially from Ethereum Foundation folks, about this topic. Pretty much everyone kept saying that “Ethereum will be quantum safe in no time and there’s no real risk”, Vitalik included, on multiple occasions. Yet, when it came to discussing technical details, opinions were way more fragmented, and our general impression is that the EF internal roadmap to quantum resistance is not yet completely settled. Furthermore, several EF cryptographers kept downplaying the quantum risks to currently used cryptography. This is probably not optimal, but understandable: The EF, like everyone else, has only recently realize that this menace is real. The important thing is that the wind has changed, and I expect to see the Eth crowd aligned behind a tangible quantum plan within the next months.
Yet, this made us realize that
We need a failsafe.
I am quite confident that the Ethereum Foundation will manage to upgrade to quantum safety in time. Yet, the biggest blocker here is that they want to do it, comprehensibly, without sacrificing performance. This, primarily, is the reason why it will take them several years to implement all the needed upgrades. Estimates being circulated talked about ~2030 for the completion of the upgrade. And yet several people, Vitalik included, quoted the (by this point well known) warning by Scott Aaronson about quantum being possibly able to run Shor by 2028.
This, by itself, should be considered a big existential risk. If your roadmap takes longer to implement than the most optimistic estimates about quantum — which in this particular case come from probably the most esteemeed and corporate-neutral expert in the field — then we may have a problem.
Given our expertise in the field, we’ve been mulling for quite some time as of now about what we can do about this, and how we can help the Ecosystem. We set a two or three requirements for ourselves:
- We do not want to get into the EF way. The guys there are doing God’s work and we want to be able to offer complementary, and not overlapping, support.
- We want solutions which are applicable in a matter of months. If the EF is building an “endgame update” which doesn’t sacrifice performance but takes more time, we want to build a “failsafe switch upgrade” which sacrifices some performance but can be completely deployed by end of 2026.
- We want to be able to act independently to minimize “political discussions” and long-winded talks. So, our solution should not strictly depend on hard-forks.
Luckily enough, we have already a well-specced solution. I cannot say much more about it at this stage, but we’ve been thinking about it for months now and have already started core R&D. We used Devconnect to talk with key players — wallet providers, client developers, EF people — to explore the feasibility of our proposal, and the reception has been overwhelmingly positiive.
In a nutshell, you will hear much more about Ethereum safety from us in the future, and as usual, since we’re here to bring optimism and not despair, we can tell you that in a matter of months you’ll have a way to sleep safe.
Quantum money stays strong!
This said, we’ve also kept representing the most adventurous, wondrous side of Quantum. In our public talk — which you can find embedded at the end of the post — we gave once again our general vision of what quantum can do for cryptography, besides being an attack vector. As you can see, we got to speak to a full, engaged audience, and reactions were overwhelmingly positive.
All in all, Devconnect has been a fantastic experience, and I miss Buenos Aires (and its asado) already!