CTRL/SHIFT - 15 06 2026 CHAPEL STAGE - LEONARDO DONATACCI - QUANTUM IS COMING

Um, thank you. A big applause for Leonardo. [applause] test.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Last last uh speech of the day. I'll try to keep it short, very technical as well.

Uh we're going to talk about quantum. You might have heard like I'm not going to talk about like what is quantum compute etc etc. We had three days pretty much to explain why quantum is important, what where it's coming from and like why is important for blockchain to actually be be um be postquantum secure. So Dave nice quantum isn't a hoax it's deadline. Uh this is very important because some people uh think that Qday is actually very far and it might be very far but at the same time it's like we don't have to figure out like we don't have to um um we don't have to just like say it's so far away that we don't have to work right now.

But it's actually very very important for us to figure out a way to actually make blockchain quantum secure. And at the same time it's like it's not like we we shouldn't make quantum uh Solana for example quantum secure right now fully but we should do what makes sense for the risk that we have right now to to come into quantum but at the same time for the timeline and what the blockchain could actually uh could actually do. So for uh for to be quantum sec so first of all this is not the official Solana road map we Solana doesn't have an official road map uh it's more or like uh more of like there are a lot of cont core contributor like blue shift that works in tandem with foundation and other another company to figure out what's the best way for uh for making son quantum quantum safe. So here it's just the blue sheet vision could be what Solana decide to adopt in the future could could not be but at the same time it's like it's very very important for us to talk about like the research that we have been we've been conducting and we've been publishing in the in the past two years. So first of all uh the first phase of making Solana quantum quantum safe is actually to secure the VM.

Solana is actually pretty lucky because um authority can be represented with what we call PDAs. PDAs are offcurve addresses and this means that it's not a normal key pair. It's not a normal uh wallet but it's actually a wallet that that doesn't have any secret key. This means that it's actually not crackable by by quantum. And this is perfect because to secure the VM that it should be the first uh the first phase and spoiler alert has been secure for the past year.

Uh we just need to have more signature that validate that PDA and so right now uh thanks to Dean my co-founder that is a very like it's one of the smartest person that I know and it's definitely a very very smart cryptographer. uh he developed the first three quantum quantum secure signature on Salana and that are Falcon, O and Winter Nits. And the cool thing about it uh the cool thing about it is like last year when everybody was like scrambling for quantum everybody was talking about quantum they were like there is no way the blockchain becomes quantum secure. Dean went and figured out that there there is a quantum signature that is winter needs that can actually be uh done on Salana. And so we we scrambled for a week.

Uh we pushed this winter wallet we called it and it's pretty much the first we could say I'm not sure about the other blockchain but it's probably the first uh between all the blockchain to have a real wallet a usable wallet that could actually make your asset quantum secure. And so we call it winter wallet. And it was such an important step for Salana that the last paper that Google publicized actually put in the in the research and and and put Salana in our winter wallet implementation uh with Algorand and XRP as one of the uh one of the way we could actually make quantum quantum uh quantum secure blockchain right now. So there are two ways to be uh to be safe uh today and forever. That was like one sec.

Okay. Sorry. Uh this was the the slide before the phase one, but we're going to go back to it. So there are two ways to be safe today and forever. uh today and this is what we have right now on Salana is pretty much an optim version of quantum safe uh quantum uh quantum proof.

So you actually need to decide and make the mindful decision of actually making your asset quantum safe. And then there is the forever version of it that is to actually make the the the old blockchain natively um quantum safe. And that in my opinion is not needed to be um to actually be done right now because as we we're going to see during the talk there are some not some problems but there are some underlying issues that might not make it feasible. Not feasible but it might not make it uh really smart to actually do right now. So perfect.

Now uh step one secure the VM. Now we need to secure the the supply chain. So as we said before to secure a supply chain means to actually uh for example secure the ownership of assets or secure for example the deployment of new programs. And the way that we do that is actually by uh by giving the authorities to PDA. But giving the authorities to PDA means that then we need to reinvent a consensus that can fit inside of a program that is actually quantum safe.

And uh the way that we that we discovered to be done that was to first of all as we said we shipped the tree signature but then we shipped another product that is called vector that is right now live and the way that vector works is that pretty much you represent the consensus in a different way. So you could have multiple signatures. So you could create for example a multi uh a multisig right now that is quantum safe with all three signature or you could just like create an EOA or a program that represent the ownership of like a token uh with one only one of the quantum uh quantum safe blockchain. It's really really funny because two weeks ago uh or that is uh SOV uh token so use proof of uh proof of work mining of new of new token decide to become quantum safe right now. So they use vector and every wallet that ships right now with or is actually quantum safe because it uses vector under the hood.

Step three, this is where we start to to to go into the native version of it. And so we already have the uh what is the problem of becoming native right now? First of all uh when we sign with a normal ET ed ED2511 ED25519 keeper the signature just takes 32 bytes and that's pretty easy like we right now in Salana we can fit up to 1,200 uh bytes in a single in a single transaction. So we can fit enough signature to make sure that everything works. When we talk about o for example that is probably one of the that is the smallest quantum signature that we have right now um o is 555.

So you might understand that we can feed only two signature right now on onto Salana. So it's not really an interesting way to to to figure out how to uh how to do quantum safe. Uh spoiler alert already before all the quantum talk and just because Solana is trying to go faster, better and becoming bigger. Uh next month actually we're going to we're going to enable what we call CMD uh uh 296 and CMD our Salana improvement proposal that will increase the block from 1,200 to four 4,996. So this means that already we can feed eight for example O signature and it will become better and better and better because right now the main the main blocker there is like the underlying uh infrastructure and if we can forex right now we can 4x in the next year if that's becomes like something that we really care about.

The other cool thing that is that that is actually shipped today is uh XDP. So pretty much the way that we send the uh since uh Solana and every blockchain has a lot of distributed node uh you need a way for receiving and sending to other nodes all the transactions. It was already pretty and that and that that component is called turbine. Uh it was already pretty efficient. Uh as ag said before we survived Trump with no issue.

uh but uh naturally we weren't happy enough and so we decided to ship XDP and XTP already put a 200x uh improvement on sending those packets and so this means that if we need to enable bigger blocks soon we actually have the possibility of transfer them pretty easily thanks to the XDP upgrade. Oh sorry uh go back one second. The only the only problem right now that would say let's just increase the block right now and becomes like super safe right now is Alpenlow. So Solanas is uh going to change consensus uh hopefully by the end of the year and the main problem is that the new consensus use aggregate signature and the BLS uses and right now unfortunately we don't have we don't still have a quantum signature that can be used with uh with aggregate signature. So once we solve that problem we could go quantum quantum safe tomorrow.

So and then the last step is to retire every signature that is not uh safe and we have three different ways. So what we propose is the us use um is to pro ownership of the old key using um using stark that is a postquantum zk proof uh signature. So once we once we once you can say I own the old old account please give me access to the new one then we can pretty much tie that uh that signature forever. Um and this is actually safe because the ED25519 key is derived from a SHA 512 ash of the seed. So this means that by using the seed of the ED251 two ED25519 key we can actually prove in a safe way that the same uh O for example signature is the same wallet.

Last and for all, the advantage of Salan is that we can migrate that in a in a couple of hours differently from Bitcoin. Right now there are talks that says that Bitcoin to migrate everything will probably take like two three years. And so for them it's like it's much more important to be prepared right now because if we forecast that the Q day is coming for example in 10 years it puts them to say I need to create a buffer of three years to make sure that I can migrate everything on Salana that with the with the true that we have it probably will come in two three hours. Cool. So we write a lot of cool papers.

Uh there is a very very cool paper written by Dean uh on crypto on the cryptography be behind the qu being creating quantum safe um blockchain. Uh this probably will take you to the blue shift website but there is a research tab and if you go on the research tab you'll see the the write up that I that I mentioned here in the in this um in this talk. Thank you guys for listening. [applause] Any question from the audience or should we just get and go to to the operative that that we have outside? I guess everybody's tired enough.

Everything is very very odd. Thank you. Thank you guys for uh for being here for spending the afternoon with us. We're really grateful that people turned up and uh and wanted to hear about Salana. Uh we have a beautiful terrace, we have operative, we had food, we have alcohol.

Please just enjoy the enjoy the night and come talk to us if you guys want. Thank you. [applause]