AmericanFortress, a blockchain security company, has proposed a cryptographic approach aimed at making today’s cryptocurrency wallets more resilient to potential future quantum attacks—withou
AmericanFortress, a blockchain security company, has proposed a cryptographic approach aimed at making today’s cryptocurrency wallets more resilient to potential future quantum attacks—without asking users to move funds, rotate keys, or change their wallet addresses.
In a technical paper posted to the Cryptography ePrint Archive, the company describes how it would add post-quantum protections while keeping wallet address formats intact. The work is positioned as compatible with seed-based hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets commonly used across networks that rely on elliptic-curve cryptography.
AmericanFortress’s proposal is laid out in a paper available on the Cryptography ePrint Archive (https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1508). The company frames its central goal as reducing the friction of post-quantum migration: if quantum-capable attackers ever become capable of breaking elliptic-curve cryptography, wallets would ideally upgrade their security properties without forcing users to transfer funds to new addresses.
According to the paper, the scheme is designed to fit seed-based HD wallet constructions—structures that generate many addresses and keys from a single seed phrase. AmericanFortress says the mechanism is compatible with wallets used across ecosystems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, alongside other networks that depend on elliptic-curve cryptography.
The proposal does not rely on discarding the existing elliptic-curve-based key material. Instead, it introduces an additional verification layer: nodes would validate zero-knowledge proofs built from the wallet’s original seed phrase. Meanwhile, users would continue signing transactions using their current keys.
That distinction matters for practicality. Most post-quantum strategies require some form of migration—new address types, new key formats, or user actions that can be costly, operationally risky, or confusing at scale. AmericanFortress’s approach aims to shift the burden toward network-side verification rather than user-side replacement.
AmericanFortress’s paper ties its motivation to widely discussed concerns about cryptographic longevity. While quantum computers capable of breaking elliptic-curve cryptography do not exist today, researchers generally agree that sufficiently powerful systems could eventually render current elliptic-curve protections unreliable.
The company also cites an analysis from Bloomberg estimating that up to $470 billion in Bitcoin could be at risk in a scenario where sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available. Although such estimates depend on assumptions about adversarial capability and timeline, they underscore why the industry is working on “future-proofing” now rather than waiting for an end-game scenario to arrive.
In the meantime, multiple blockchain and research efforts have begun mapping migration routes. The paper situates AmericanFortress’s proposal alongside those broader efforts by aiming to minimize disruptions for end users—an especially sensitive constraint for wallet designs that must handle large volumes of legacy addresses and long-lived funds.
AmericanFortress is not the only participant in the post-quantum wallet security race. On Tuesday, Freedom Factory introduced PQ1, which it describes as a post-quantum hardware wallet for Ethereum and other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.
Where AmericanFortress’s approach is software-based and seeks compatibility with existing wallet address structures, PQ1 relies on post-quantum cryptographic signatures produced within dedicated hardware. Freedom Factory says the wallet uses SPHINCS+C10 signatures and is designed to secure transactions via ERC-4337 smart accounts.
The difference highlights a fundamental tension in post-quantum planning: some strategies aim to retrofit protection into the present without changing addresses, while others focus on moving security to new cryptographic primitives—often with hardware or account-system changes to manage complexity. For users, these distinctions can determine whether upgrades feel like an update or like a migration.
Industry momentum toward quantum resistance is visible across multiple ecosystems. In recent months, a Strategy-led consortium pledged $15 million to fund Bitcoin quantum security research. Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation published a proposal outlining a path for migrating accounts to quantum-resistant cryptography. Separately, Algorand has stated plans to introduce quantum-resistant accounts by 2027.
Taken together, these efforts suggest that different networks are converging on the same problem—protecting cryptographic guarantees in a post-quantum world—but not converging on a single technical method. Some will emphasize protocol-level migration, others will rely on account abstraction, and others will attempt compatibility layers that reduce changes for users.
For readers tracking practical progress, the key question is how proposals like AmericanFortress’s would be integrated at the network level: whether nodes can verify the required zero-knowledge proofs efficiently, how the scheme would be standardized, and what changes would be needed for wallet software and transaction formats to support broader adoption.
As post-quantum work shifts from theory to implementations, watch for how (and how quickly) cryptographic proposals move from ePrint into peer review, prototype testing, and—crucially—real protocol or client integrations. Even if quantum threats remain hypothetical in the near term, the winners will likely be the approaches that minimize operational disruption while remaining verifiable at scale.
This article was originally published as AmericanFortress Unveils Quantum-Safe Wallet Security Without Moving Funds on Crypto Breaking News – your trusted source for crypto news, Bitcoin news, and blockchain updates.
