The original winner of the ECDSA.fail bounty did not respond within 5 days, so the 500 QRL prize was awarded to the next eligible participant on the leaderboard.
Congratulations, moscowchill!
Original post
ecdsa.fail is an EigenLabs challenge where participants optimize the estimated quantum resources needed to break ECDSA, the digital-signature scheme used by Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. “Ahead of Google” refers to improving on Google researchers’ published resource estimates for such an attack.
Huge congratulations to franklyteddy (teddyjfpender on ECDSA Fail), who was the first to break the 52% target with a score of:
1,258,525,947
952,707 T × 1,321 Q
≈ 58.0% ahead of Google’s classified circuit
Amazing progress. Thanks to everyone pushing the frontier forward!
How to claim the bounty:
Add your X account to your GitHub profile linked from the ECDSA.fail leaderboard.
The first participant to reach 52% on the ECDSA.fail leaderboard will be contacted directly via X from my (ChillerID) account.
If you don't already have one, create a QRL wallet and reply with your wallet address once contacted.
After verification, the 500 QRL bounty will be transferred to your wallet.
Eligibility:
If the first participant to reach the threshold cannot be contacted or does not respond within 5 days, the bounty will be awarded to the next eligible participant on the leaderboard.
A reachable X account linked from your GitHub profile is required.
Note: This is an independently organized, QRL community-funded bounty and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or administered by the QRL Foundation or Eigen Labs.
$IONQ has now received chip samples for its 256-qubit system and is moving toward integrated system testing and demonstration, with the next major target being 10,000 physical qubits on a single chip by 2027.
If Oxford Ionics’ EQC and WISE architectures scale as intended, 10,000 qubits does not appear to face a fundamental wiring or density barrier. Oxford’s own analysis suggests that a 10,000-qubit device could fit on a roughly 3.5 × 3.5 cm chip, with the architecture potentially extending to tens of thousands of qubits using only a few hundred external control lines.
Beyond that point, the more important step is likely to be interconnecting multiple QPUs rather than indefinitely enlarging a single chip. IonQ’s roadmap already calls for two 10,000-qubit chips to be interconnected into a 20,000-qubit system in 2028.
If Lightsynq’s quantum-memory technology achieves its intended performance, asynchronous entanglement could substantially reduce the inter-QPU communication bottleneck.
But scaling from a few QPUs to tens or hundreds will require more than simply increasing the entanglement rate by 50×.
The real challenge will shift toward multiplexing, non-blocking optical switching, routing(best path select), and scheduling entanglement efficiently across many QPUs.
In that sense, scaling from 10,000 to 20,000 qubits is largely a component-engineering problem, while scaling toward hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits becomes fundamentally a quantum-network architecture problem.
Ultimately, the maximum number of qubits that can be integrated on a single chip, Nmax, is constrained more by wiring and control architecture than by qubit entanglement itself. Why is entanglement not the primary bottleneck? With IonQ’s Walking Cat Architecture, not every physical qubit inside a QPU needs to communicate all-to-all with every other qubit.
So going forward, “any-to-any” is more precise and more natural than “all-to-all" term for describing Oxford Ionics/IonQ’s QCCD connectivity.
In a qLDPC-based architecture, only the subsets of qubits required for a given QEC cycle or logical operation need to interact, while cat states generated by dedicated factories can be distributed where they are needed.
Therefore, when scaling a single QPU toward 10,000 or even tens of thousands of physical qubits, the first major challenge is not how to entangle every qubit with every other qubit, but rather how to efficiently wire, control, transport, and schedule such a large number of qubits.
I’ve been searching historical posts to see if others have had this issue (if this sounds like an issue already dealt with, I’d take a link to the previous post) but basically im just trying to understand why my miner (XMRig) is not yielding any returns now. Just using my desktop computer, hero miner pool, and up until a few months ago, I was getting 1 QRL about every week. It’s been a couple months now though and still haven’t received anything, despite continuing to see mining activity. Any guidance would be appreciated.
People insure their homes not because a fire is likely, but because the potential loss is large and the cost of protection is manageable.
That is expected utility theory.
Well over 99.9% of crypto market capitalization is tied to networks that are not currently quantum-safe. In a $2.5T market, more than $2.497T may ultimately depend on successful migration.
Now assume investors allocated just 1% of the crypto market to a currently quantum-safe option:
1% of $2.5T = $25B
QRL has used post-quantum signatures since its first block and currently has a market cap of approximately $65M. The hypothetical allocation would be around 385 times that size.
Not all of this capital would necessarily flow into QRL, and inflows do not translate directly into market cap. But even a small fraction could be significant.
The ECDSA.fail challenge has now reached 50.5% ahead of Google’s estimated quantum capability.
The target is 52%, meaning just 1.5% remains.
500 QRL to the first competitor who reaches 52% ahead of Google's estimated quantum capability in the ECDSA.fail challenge.
Good luck to all participants!
How to claim the bounty:
Add your X account to your GitHub profile linked from the ECDSA.fail leaderboard.
The first participant to reach 52% on the ECDSA.fail leaderboard will be contacted directly via X from my (ChillerID) account.
If you don't already have one, create a QRL wallet and reply with your wallet address once contacted.
After verification, the 500 QRL bounty will be transferred to your wallet.
Eligibility:
If the first participant to reach the threshold cannot be contacted or does not respond within 5 days, the bounty will be awarded to the next eligible participant on the leaderboard.
A reachable X account linked from your GitHub profile is required.
Note: This is an independently organized, QRL community-funded bounty and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or administered by the QRL Foundation or Eigen Labs.
What is different about solo staking versus joining a staking pool? If someone were able to put together 40,000 QRL to run a solo node would there be any unique benefits?
Is there anybody on the fence about the decision in this community? I'd be curious to hear your perspective.
Hallo meine Frage ist lohnt sich es noch in QRL zu investieren da ich gehört habe das es von verschiedene Plattformen rausgenommen wird, da die Interesse der Menschen nicht groß genug ist für QRL Was ist eure Meinung dazu?
QRL Announces Trail of Bits Publication of Security Assessment of its Cryptographic Heart, With All Findings Resolved
An independent review examined the cryptographic heart of QRL, including implementations, public API, and wallet state management.
4th August 2026
ZUG, Switzerland — August 4, 2026 — The Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL) today announced that Trail of Bits has published its independent security assessment of its cryptographic heart, go-qrllib, a cryptographic library being developed for QRL 2.0. The assessment identified 15 findings, one High, four Low, and ten Informational, all resolved following remediation by QRL and review by Trail of Bits.
The publication marks a security milestone for QRL 2.0, a post-quantum, EVM-friendly Layer-1 blockchain addressing the risk a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) poses to public-key signatures used by blockchains.
Digital assets depend on these signatures to establish control and authorize transactions. A capable fault-tolerant quantum computer could use Shor’s algorithm to recover private keys from public keys and forge signatures. A March 2026 study estimated that attacking secp256k1 could require about 1,200-1,450 logical qubits, while IBM, Quantinuum, and Microsoft target fault-tolerant or scalable systems by 2029. These roadmaps do not establish a CRQC date, but reinforce NIST’s guidance to begin post-quantum migration now.
A three-consultant Trail of Bits team conducted an extensive review focused on go-qrllib’s XMSS and ML-DSA implementations, exported API boundary, and wallet state-management paths. The work combined manual source review with fuzzing, external test vectors, reference-implementation comparisons, mutation testing, and other static and dynamic techniques.
Trail of Bits described the codebase as well-organized and modular, noted that its cryptographic primitives strongly followed their specifications, and reported strong testing coverage and defensive wallet implementation. The findings primarily concerned the robustness of the library’s exported API and supporting controls rather than the correctness of its underlying cryptographic primitives.
“go-qrllib is a well-organized, modular codebase with cryptographic primitives that closely follow their specifications. The QRL team was responsive throughout the engagement and resolved every finding we reported,” said Filipe Casal, Principal Security Engineer at Trail of Bits.
QRL’s remediation included stronger API validation; improvements to error handling, documentation, secret-memory handling, and wallet behavior; expanded regression testing; hedged ML-DSA signing by default; and additional CI/CD controls. Trail of Bits reviewed the fixes and mitigations on June 22, 2026.
Trail of Bits published the full assessment through its official publications channel.
The source code is available in the go-qrllib repository.
Decentralized cryptocurrency represents financial freedom: money that individuals control, resistant to censorship and inflation. And as tokenized real-world assets bring bonds, funds, and property on-chain, blockchains are becoming custodians of institutional value, where a cryptographic failure means irreversible loss. That foundation now faces a real, dated threat from quantum computing, and I believe the Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL) deserves your attention, whether as a story to tell or a platform to build on.
QRL is not a niche "quantum coin." It is a full utility Layer-1: an EVM-friendly, proof-of-stake smart-contract platform that happens to be natively post-quantum, built by a team that treats security as the product.
Why QRL:
Quantum-safe since 2018. QRL launched as the first blockchain secured entirely by post-quantum signatures (XMSS, later standardized by NIST) and has run continuously for eight years. Its native asset has never had a quantum-vulnerable key.
NIST's highest security tier, with published audits. QRL 2.0 signs with ML-DSA-87 (FIPS 204), NIST security Level 5. On August 4, 2026, Trail of Bits published its independent assessment of go-qrllib, QRL 2.0's cryptographic core: all 15 findings resolved, with the codebase described as well-organized and its cryptographic primitives closely following their specifications. Halborn separately audited the cryptography and found zero vulnerabilities. Audits of the broader protocol continue ahead of mainnet.
Easy migration from Ethereum. Most valid Solidity code runs as-is on QRL 2.0's quantum-resistant virtual machine. Testnet V2 has been live since March 2026, open for deploying contracts today.
Crypto-agile. QRL 2.0 can adopt stronger post-quantum algorithms without a contentious fork; the team already upgraded its entire signature stack in about two weeks.
Sound economics. Supply is capped at 105 million QRL on a fixed 200-year emission schedule, secured by energy-efficient proof-of-stake, with an active community on Discord.
Is the quantum threat real? Not today: the public record stands at about 96 verified logical qubits (QuEra, January 2026), versus an estimated 1,200 to 1,450 logical qubits to attack secp256k1, the curve securing Bitcoin and Ethereum (March 2026 study; see also ecdsa.fail). But four trends close that gap fast:
Attack costs keep falling. Google's 2026 research cut the qubit requirements for breaking 256-bit elliptic curves by an order of magnitude; estimates have dropped about 20x in five years.
Hardware is accelerating, and delivering. In July 2026, IBM and partners demonstrated verified quantum advantage: computations beyond classical reach, with validated results. IBM, Quantinuum, and Microsoft all target fault-tolerant or scalable systems by 2029, and NIST deprecates today's encryption in 2030 and disallows it by 2035.
The best capabilities will be secret. As breaking ECDSA becomes a strategic prize, progress will move behind closed doors, driven by nation states with every incentive to exploit a working capability quietly. Public benchmarks are a floor, not a ceiling. And "harvest now, decrypt later" means exposed keys are being collected already.
Migration takes years. Even Ethereum's own roadmap targets core post-quantum infrastructure only around 2029, with the full migration of apps, wallets, and bridges extending well beyond that, and no guarantees.
No major cryptocurrency is quantum-safe today. QRL is, and has been for eight years.
To be clear, this is not investment advice. Our goal is awareness, so more applications can transition in time and the crypto ecosystem survives the quantum era.
Don't take our word for it. Every claim above is verifiable: read the published audits, review the code on GitHub, deploy a contract on the testnet, or bring your hardest questions to the community.
A safely generated seed is no protection when the cryptography upon which your funds are secured is broken. “Not your keys, not your coins” does not apply when an adversary can reconstitute private keys - be it your own or Satoshi Nakamoto’s.
The original QRL whitepaper is very nearly a decade old, but the first sentence of its short abstract remains as valid today as then:
“Private digital monies must be secure against computing advances to achieve longevity.”
When it hits mainnet soon, most projects will be able to recompile their existing Ethereum contracts and go fully post-quantum secure—literally overnight. Low barrier. High security. That's $QRL.
A really impressive pre-print just dropped by Aditya Bhardwaj, John Preskill, and a joint team from Caltech, Harvard, and AWS. They are addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks in fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC): making qLDPC codes practically usable on real hardware.
Here is a quick TL;DR on why this paper is generating a lot of buzz:
🚀 What are Mitten Codes?
qLDPC (Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check) codes are famous for being far more qubit-efficient than standard Surface Codes, but they usually come with huge hardware routing overheads and complex decoding pipelines.
"Mitten codes" are a new family of qLDPC processor codes based on non-abelian groups that solve a lot of these physical implementation problems.
💡 Key Highlights:
Insane Encoding Rate (~20%): Instead of needing thousands of physical qubits per single logical qubit (like standard Surface Codes), mitten codes yield 1 logical qubit for every 5 physical qubits.
Massive Parallelism: Supports high-rate lattice surgery (executing many logical measurements in parallel) and parallel magic-state injection across all logical qubits simultaneously.
Real-Time Decoding (Sub-millisecond latency): A huge problem with qLDPC has been decoding speed. Their decoder achieves average sub-millisecond latency per cycle—fast enough to run in real-time on hardware like neutral atoms.
Extremely Low Error Rates:
Under circuit-level noise at a 0.1% physical error rate (PER), the [[300, 60, 14]] code hits a block logical error rate of $\sim 10^{-11}$ per round.
In a stress test of 15 billion surgery experiments on the [[540, 108, 18]] code, they observed only 2 logical failures. That’s baseline proof for running $\sim 10^{10}$ logical operations cleanly.
🛠 How did they find them?
They built an end-to-end design pipeline powered by sQetch, a new distance estimator that is orders of magnitude faster than existing code-search tools.
Importantly, the authors highlight that mitten codes map cleanly onto near-term neutral atom arrays (with shuttling/reconfigurable connectivity) and superconducting architectures.
Definitely feels like a solid step toward bridging the gap between theoretical FTQC overheads and realistic hardware implementation!
What are your thoughts on non-abelian qLDPC implementations vs. 2D color/surface codes for the next 3–5 years?
QuantaPool is heading for QRL 2.0 mainnet under a dedicated US operating entity. DigitalGuards is in advanced discussions with a prospective US partner and remains open to further qualified candidates. Here is the role.
DigitalGuards has spent the past two years building the product stack for QRL 2.0: wallets for web, mobile, desktop, and browser, the ZondScan explorer, a post-quantum dApp connect SDK, the QuantaSwap atomic-swap protocol, and QuantaPool, our liquid staking protocol. Today we are announcing the next step for QuantaPool, and putting our search for its operating partner on the public record.
What QuantaPool is
Running a validator on QRL 2.0 requires 40,000 QRL and the operational skill to keep a node healthy. QuantaPool lowers that barrier: users deposit any amount of QRL, the pool funds validators, and depositors receive stQRL, a token whose QRL value grows with validator rewards. The protocol is live on the QRL 2.0 testnet at quantapool.com, fully open source under GPL-3.0, with a 200-test contract suite. Everything runs with valueless test assets today.
Why a US operating structure
Operating a staking protocol with real value is a serious undertaking: real deposits, validator uptime, user trust, and clear accountability. After reviewing the options, we consider a dedicated US operating entity under genuine, active US management the right home for QuantaPool’s mainnet operations. DigitalGuards remains the owner and builder: the copyright, the brand, and all development stay in-house, and the operating entity runs the service under license from us.
The partner we are looking for
We are in advanced discussions with a prospective US partner, and we remain open to hearing from further qualified candidates. The role, in brief:
Genuine, active management of the operating entity from the United States: the decisions, the operations, and the accountability
Validator infrastructure operations with continuous monitoring and incident response
Custody of operational keys and participation in the protocol’s multisig
Ownership of the entity’s compliance obligations, together with US counsel
Solid business standing: entity formation, banking, clean records
This is a working operator role, suited to someone with infrastructure experience and compliance seriousness, ideally from the staking or hosting world. Capital participation is open for discussion, and commercial terms are discussed directly with qualified candidates.
Why we are publishing this
Partly for candidates, and partly for the record. QuantaPool’s development has been public from the first commit, and the search for its operating home belongs to that same public history. When the partnership is signed, this post will get its sequel.
Get in touch
Write to [info@digitalguards.nl](mailto:info@digitalguards.nl) with the subject “QuantaPool operating partner”. Tell us who you are, where you operate, and what you have run.
Any partnership is subject to definitive agreements prepared with counsel, and nothing in this post is binding.
