Banks and financial regulators across Europe, the Middle East and Asia have joined a pilot testing quantum-resistant infrastructure for digital asset wallets and onchain transfers.
The Responsible Fintech Institute and crypto custody infrastructure provider Safeheron announced the initiative on Monday, saying participating banks will test post-quantum wallet generation and transfers in a shared application environment.
NIST Signatures on a Quantum-Safe Testnet
The pilot uses a multiparty computation protocol supporting ML-DSA-65 — a post-quantum digital signature standard published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology — running on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet.
Regulatory participants include Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan's Gelephu Financial Services Office and Malta's Financial Services Authority, which will observe the first phase and contribute to a governance workstream later. Bison Bank and DK Bank are participating as financial institutions.
The organizers plan to publish a white paper covering the research, protocol design and test findings, and eventually open-source the underlying technology.
The Migration Clock Is Ticking
The pilot lands as financial authorities accelerate preparations for quantum computers capable of breaking the public-key cryptography securing most of today's digital assets. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has set a 2030 target for the banking sector's quantum readiness, and a 2025 BIS paper urged financial institutions to begin coordinated, phased migrations to post-quantum systems rather than waiting for the threat to materialize.
For blockchains the question is more acute: unlike a bank, a public chain cannot quietly re-issue keys, and "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks mean data captured today could be compromised retroactively. Ethereum's own post-quantum roadmap has shifted strategy this year, with the Foundation dropping the Poseidon hash function from its migration plan.
Getting regulators into the room at the testnet stage is the notable part of Monday's announcement. Post-quantum migration will be judged acceptable by supervisors or it will not be adopted at scale — and pilots that bake in MPC custody, NIST standards and observer status for financial watchdogs are how that coordination gets built before the clock runs out.