The Ethereum Foundation has committed to making Ethereum (ETH) resistant to quantum computers by December 2029, treating the date as a fixed deadline rather than a research goal.

The Protocol cluster published that target alongside its scoring of 62 proposals for Hegotá, the hard fork after Glamsterdam. 

Ethereum Fixes a Deadline It Cannot Schedule

The Foundation wants Ethereum’s base layer to be quantum-resistant across execution, consensus, and data. Its priorities blog says the network should plan for Q-day arriving as early as 2030.

That target matches migration timelines independently set by Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft. The Foundation acknowledged that it is front-running most credible forecasts.

“Planning for Q-day in 2030 is a deliberately aggressive assumption,” the blog reads.

The cluster will treat the deadline as non-negotiable at least until January 2027, when outside experts help reassess quantum progress. Roughly 65% of ETH already sits in quantum-vulnerable addresses, according to Project Eleven.

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Hegotá Becomes the First Test of the 2029 Promise

The Foundation framed Hegotá as the fork that decides whether the later post-quantum forks ship on time. Full resistance sits five hard forks out, and hitting December 2029 would need an average of 7.2 months per fork, a pace the cluster itself calls aggressive.

Frame Transactions carries that load as the must-ship execution-layer item, opening a path to new signature schemes without a hard fork for each one. A separate A-tier package, EIP-8298 and EIP-8151, completes the route by letting accounts abandon secp256k1 as the master key. A third, EIP-8365, starts retiring validator withdrawal credentials still tied to vulnerable cryptography.

The consensus layer gets the opposite treatment. Its cryptography cannot be swapped without a fork, so components wait for the complete design. Hash-Chain RANDAO landed at B tier, sound in direction but early in sequence.

The reluctance extends to the execution layer. ML-DSA verification precompiles fell to C tier, with the cluster declining to enshrine one scheme before a dedicated cryptographic review.

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Source: BeInCrypto