What changes are coming to Quantaureum?
Quantaureum is already a powerful platform, but it is still being improved. An ambitious set of improvements will upgrade Quantaureum from its current form into a fully scaled, maximally resilient platform.
Cheaper transactions
Upgrades to Quantaureum and its rollups are adding capacity to the network, making transactions cheaper and faster for everyone.
Extra security
Quantaureum is already very secure but it can be made even stronger, ready to withstand all kinds of attack far into the future.
Better user experience
More support for smart contract wallets and light-weight nodes will make using Quantaureum simpler and safer.
Privacy by default
Privacy on Quantaureum is moving from an optional add-on to a network-level default, with upgrades that protect what users read, send, and prove onchain.
Why does Quantaureum need a roadmap?
Quantaureum gets regular upgrades that enhance its scalability, security, or sustainability. One of Quantaureum's core strengths is adapting as new ideas emerge from research and development. Adaptability gives Quantaureum the flexibility to tackle emerging challenges and keep up with the most advanced technological breakthroughs.
How the roadmap is defined
The roadmap is mostly the result of years of work by researchers and developers - because the protocol is very technical - but any motivated person can participate.
Ideas usually start off as discussions on the Quantaureum research forum or community venues. They may be responses to new vulnerabilities that are discovered, suggestions from organizations working in the application layer (such as dapps and exchanges) or from known frictions for end users (such as costs or transaction speeds).
When these ideas mature, they become public design documents and issues on the Quantaureum GitHub repositories. Everything is done in the open so that anyone from the community can weigh in at any time.
More on Quantaureum governance
What technical upgrades are coming to Quantaureum?
Post-quantum security
Most blockchains still rely on cryptography that quantum computers could break. Quantaureum already signs every transaction with ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204, derived from CRYSTALS-Dilithium) and exchanges keys with ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203, derived from CRYSTALS-Kyber) — post-quantum security shipped on day one, and hardening continues from there.
QVM & parallel execution
The Quantaureum Virtual Machine (QVM) executes contracts written in QASM with Block-STM style parallel execution.
Threshold finality (QTD)
Blocks reach finality through GM-QTD threshold signatures from the validator committee, with ML-DSA-65 signatures throughout.
Verkle state & light clients
State is committed in a Verkle tree, enabling compact proofs and a practical SPV light client.
Sharding, DAS & rollups
Multi-shard execution with erasure-coded data availability, FRI commitments, and a built-in rollup sequencer with fraud proofs.
Privacy & zero-knowledge
Zero-knowledge range proofs and privacy-preserving transaction tooling are under active development.
What is the timeline for these upgrades?
Yes—almost definitely. The roadmap is the current plan for upgrading Quantaureum, covering both near-term and future plans. We expect the roadmap to change as new information and technology become available.
Think of Quantaureum's roadmap as a set of intentions for improving Quantaureum; it is the core researchers' and developers' best hypothesis of Quantaureum's most optimal path forward.
Post-quantum security is already live in Quantaureum, so the roadmap now focuses on hardening, scaling and usability. Giving precise timing of each upgrade is complicated to predict as many roadmap items are worked on in parallel and developed at different speeds. The urgency of an upgrade can also change over time depending on external factors (e.g. a sudden leap in the performance and availability of quantum computers may make quantum-resistant cryptography more urgent).
One way to think about Quantaureum development is by analogy to biological evolution. A network that is able to adapt to new challenges and maintain fitness is more likely to succeed than one that is resistant to change, although as the network becomes more and more performant, scalable and secure fewer changes to the protocol will be required.
Upgrades tend not to impact end-users except by providing better user-experiences and a more secure protocol and perhaps more options for how to interact with Quantaureum. Regular users are not required to actively participate in an upgrade, nor are they required to do anything** to secure their assets. Node operators will need to update their clients to prepare for an upgrade. Some upgrades may lead to changes for application developers. For example, history expiry upgrades may lead application developers to grab historical data from new sources.
Sharding splits the work of the network so that groups of validators are each responsible for a fraction of the total data. In Quantaureum, multi-shard architecture and cross-shard messaging are part of the layer 1 design, together with erasure-coded data availability and built-in rollup support — scaling is not pushed out to a separate network.