TRON’s post-quantum signatures are running on the Nile testnet, not on mainnet. The third-quarter mainnet target Justin Sun set in April has passed without activation. TRON’s own model shows
Justin Sun said on Saturday, October 10, that TRON’s post-quantum cryptography is operational on the network’s test environment and that the chain can bring quantum-resistant protection to mainnet when it chooses. The statement concerns a network that carried $2.21 trillion in stablecoin settlement during the third quarter and hosts roughly $94 billion in USDT and USDD. Sun gave no activation date. Existing TRX and USDT wallets have not been migrated, and the proposal behind the upgrade remains a draft with an open list of security requirements.
TRON's post-quantum cryptography is now live on testnet. We're closely tracking progress in quantum computing and AI, and we're ready to bring quantum resistance to mainnet at any time.
We're committed to keeping user assets secure, and TRON is set to be one of the few major…
— H.E. Justin Sun
(@justinsuntron) October 10, 2026
The work predates the weekend announcement by several months. In April, Sun described a plan to test quantum-resistant signatures in the second quarter and move to mainnet in the third. That quarter closed on September 30. As of October 11, the upgrade is still confined to Nile, TRON’s public testnet, and Sun’s latest wording replaces a calendar target with the phrase “at any time”.
TRON post-quantum timeline, 2026
●APRIL
Rollout plan announced
Sun outlines testing in Q2 and a mainnet rollout in Q3.
●JULY 2
Falcon-512 goes live on Nile
Committee Proposal No. 20628 activates the signatures, reportedly with all 27 testnet Super Representatives in favor.
●AUGUST 27
Target shifts to year-end
At Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong, Sun reportedly points to the end of 2026 for broader protection.
●OCTOBER 8
New testnet build
GreatVoyage-Nile-v4.8.2.3-PQ1-build1 is reported on Nile.
●OCTOBER 10
Sun declares testnet readiness
Sun says mainnet can follow “at any time”. No date is given.
TRON, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, authorizes transactions with ECDSA, a signature scheme whose security rests on a mathematical problem that conventional machines cannot solve in useful time. A sufficiently large fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could derive a private key from a public key that has been exposed on-chain. Q-Day is the industry’s shorthand for the moment that becomes practical. No publicly demonstrated machine can do it today, and researchers disagree widely on when one will.
TIP-899, the TRON improvement proposal that governs the change, adds two lattice-based signature schemes as alternatives to ECDSA: FN-DSA-512, known as Falcon-512, and ML-DSA-44, the scheme the US National Institute of Standards and Technology standardized as FIPS 204 in August 2024. The proposal covers transaction signatures, block production by Super Representatives, authentication between nodes and signature checks inside the TRON Virtual Machine. Old and new signatures can coexist during the migration, and the address format stays the same, which spares exchanges and wallet providers a full re-issuance of addresses.
Post-quantum signatures are far larger than ECDSA signatures. Every transaction carries more data, every node stores and relays more, and the cost lands on the network’s capacity. TIP-899 models a ceiling of roughly 3,809 simple transfers per second with today’s ECDSA signatures. If every transaction used Falcon-512, that ceiling would fall to about 400, and with ML-DSA-44 to about 173. Those are worst-case projections for full adoption, and at a 10% Falcon share the model still shows about 2,055, but they explain why the engineering work did not end with the July activation.
Modeled TPS ceiling at 100% adoption (ECDSA baseline: ~3,809)
Falcon-512 ~400 TPS
ML-DSA-44 ~173 TPS
Worst-case model, not measured mainnet capacity. Source: TIP-899.
One fix under discussion stores public keys separately instead of attaching them to each transaction. TIP-899 also lists unresolved questions on transaction fees, hardware-wallet compatibility, smart contract migration and public-key storage. For a chain whose main commercial use is cheap dollar transfers, those items decide whether the upgrade is usable.
TRON DAO’s State of TRON report for the third quarter, published October 6, shows how much value depends on the current signature scheme.
USDT and USDD supply
$93.88B
+5.5% vs Q2
Stablecoin settlement
$2.21T
+5.1% vs Q2
Average daily settlement
$24.05B
+3.9% vs Q2
Total value locked, incl. staking
$28.21B
End of Q3 2026
TRON DAO also reports more than 405 million cumulative accounts and over $30 trillion in lifetime transaction volume, figures that count addresses and repeated transfers, not unique users or distinct economic value. A working quantum attack would not expose all USDT on TRON at once. Exposure would depend on which keys have been revealed on-chain and how accounts are structured.
Three steps separate the testnet from production. TIP-899 calls for an independent cryptographic and implementation audit, with a summary published before Super Representatives vote. It requires bug-bounty coverage for the new components. Activation then needs governance approval on mainnet. None of these has been announced as complete.
For holders, nothing changes today, and no wallet action is required. The practical consequences arrive later, when wallet software, custodians and exchanges must add support for the new signature types and users move funds to quantum-resistant keys. The draft also describes a possible emergency mechanism, with a six-hour voting window and a 22-of-27 approval threshold, plus an option to disable ECDSA entirely. Both are proposals and neither is active.
In April, Sun said TRON would be the first major public blockchain to deploy NIST-standardized post-quantum signatures on mainnet. That claim faces competition. Algorand has run Falcon signatures on its mainnet since 2022 and plans native quantum-resistant accounts. Elsewhere, Solana has explored Falcon signatures, Ethereum researchers have mapped a multi-layer transition, and the Bitcoin Security Consortium, whose nine founding members include Strategy, BlackRock and Coinbase, pledged $15 million over three years to Bitcoin security research. TRON’s own security work continued on a separate track in the past month, with OpenZeppelin announcing an integration on September 24 and TRON DAO discussing quantum readiness at an INTERPOL-related event on October 2.
Read our TRX price analysis for how the token traded through September’s ETF launch and integrations.
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