SAN FRANCISCO, April 23, 2026, 06:46 PDT
- Ripple said the XRP Ledger will move through four phases of post-quantum work, with testing under way in 2026 and a full transition targeted by 2028.
- The timing matters because Google last month moved its own post-quantum migration target to 2029 and said future quantum machines may crack the elliptic-curve cryptography used across crypto with fewer resources than earlier estimates suggested.
- The hard part is rollout, not theory: larger signatures can strain speed, storage and bandwidth, and wallets, validators and exchanges all have to coordinate.
Ripple has laid out a four-phase plan to make the XRP Ledger, the blockchain behind XRP, ready for post-quantum cryptography by 2028, putting a timetable on a security problem that much of the crypto sector is still working through. The plan starts with testing this year and ends with a formal network amendment to shift the ledger to quantum-resistant signatures at scale.
The move matters now because the threat calendar has shortened. In March, Google security executives Heather Adkins and Sophie Schmieg said the company was setting a 2029 post-quantum migration timeline, while Google researchers Ryan Babbush and Hartmut Neven said future quantum computers may break the elliptic-curve cryptography that protects cryptocurrencies with fewer qubits and gates than previously realized.
In plain English, the risk sits in digital signatures, the cryptographic proofs that let users show they control a wallet and approve a transaction. NIST, the U.S. standards body, finalized its first three post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 and has urged organizations to start transitioning, giving blockchain developers a standard set of tools rather than a theoretical shopping list.
Ripple said the first phase is a Q-Day recovery plan, shorthand for the point at which current public-key signatures can no longer be trusted. After that, the company plans to test NIST-recommended schemes in the first half of 2026, run candidate quantum-resistant signatures alongside today’s system on a development network in the second half, and then propose a protocol amendment for a broader rollout by 2028. Ripple said Project Eleven is helping with validator testing, Devnet benchmarking and a custody-wallet prototype.
“The threat has moved from theoretical to credible,” J. Ayo Akinyele, head of engineering at RippleX, wrote in the company post. Aanchal Malhotra, a research manager at Ripple, said on X that quantum computing will not break crypto “tomorrow,” but that the “preparation window is shrinking fast.” Ripple
Ripple said XRPL’s native key rotation gives it a migration edge because users can move away from old keys without abandoning their accounts. Ethereum Foundation, though, now runs its own post-quantum roadmap, and Coinbase’s independent advisory board said this week that Bitcoin is still exploring better address formats while Ethereum already has a clearer near-term path.
The market reaction was restrained. XRP traded at about $1.42 on Thursday, down a little more than 2% over 24 hours and still ranked fourth by market value at roughly $87 billion, according to CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, while Barron’s reported a broader pullback across major tokens including bitcoin and ether.
But publishing a roadmap is easier than executing one. Ripple and other researchers say post-quantum signatures are larger and heavier than today’s cryptography, which can raise storage, bandwidth and verification costs; Coinbase’s advisory board put it more bluntly this week, saying solutions exist, but deployment is the real challenge.
That uncertainty goes beyond code. Coinbase’s board said every chain will have to decide what happens to wallets that never upgrade, a governance fight that could touch lost coins, dormant accounts and custody rules. Alex Pruden, chief executive of Project Eleven, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that “the timelines are pushing from both ends” as quantum hardware improves while blockchains still face years of migration work. Coinbase
For now, researchers and industry groups say no quantum computer powerful enough to break today’s blockchain signatures exists yet. Still, Ripple is trying to show institutions and developers that XRPL has a dated migration plan while much of the sector is still debating architecture, standards and politics, and the next proof point will be test data later this year rather than another headline.
