The Ethereum Foundation expects to complete the quantum security upgrade by 2029.

The Ethereum Foundation released a new roadmap on Tuesday outlining how its development team is preparing for the threat of quantum computing. The Foundation's quantum team anticipates a series of initial upgrades to the network by 2029, primarily involving four key hard forks. The Foundation states that quantum computing will eventually break public-key cryptography, which protects ownership, authentication, and consensus in all digital systems, but this threat is not expected to materialize immediately. Researchers on the Foundation's quantum team anticipate that cryptographically capable quantum computing will not emerge for another 8 to 12 years. Of the four hard forks, the "I" fork will provide quantum-safe public keys to network validators, and the "J" fork will reduce the gas fees for verifying quantum-safe signatures; these two upgrades are already being considered for the Hegota fork, expected later this year. The "L" fork will compress the network state representation into zero-knowledge proofs, and the "M" fork will protect Layer 2 networks from quantum threats. Researchers say the Layer 1 protocol upgrades can be completed by 2029, while a full execution layer migration will take several more years afterward. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated quantum team in January of this year, and the developer testnet began testing some quantum functions in March.