Cardano's Charles Hoskinson on Post-Quantum Cryptography and Industry Trade-Offs
Charles Hoskinson of Cardano has addressed the emerging challenges of transitioning cryptocurrencies to post-quantum cryptography standards. While standards like those from NIST scheduled for 2024 already exist, Hoskinson warns that their current implementations are too slow for broad adoption, which could lead to significant throughput reductions if adopted prematurely.
He emphasizes that the timing of adoption is more critical than the exact cryptographic changes, as an early switch to post-quantum crypto may incur high costs if miners or validators are unprepared.
Hoskinson highlights DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative as a crucial reference for assessing practical quantum risks, noting DARPA's 2033 target to evaluate utility-scale quantum computing feasibility.
Cardano advocates for a staged mitigation strategy over an immediate protocol-wide switch to post-quantum cryptography. Potential mitigations include post-quantum signed checkpoints of Cardano’s ledger history using technologies like Mithril and the Midnight sidechain, though these come with trade-offs in finality models.
The conversation around post-quantum cryptography features two major paths: hash-based cryptography, which Ethereum favors, and lattice-based cryptography, pursued by Cardano. Each approach has unique strengths and limitations — hash-based cryptography is simpler and more conservative but mainly suited for signatures, whereas lattice-based cryptography supports both signatures and encryption, enabling broader post-quantum capabilities.
Lattice-based cryptography also benefits from acceleration on GPUs, allowing cryptographic operations to utilize existing AI-grade compute hardware rather than relying on custom ASICs.
Given that most major networks currently use elliptic-curve cryptography, which quantum algorithms like Shor’s could soon compromise, Hoskinson stresses the necessity of developing mitigations while avoiding hasty protocol changes.
This divergence in methods—Ethereum’s focus on hash-based cryptography versus Cardano’s direction towards lattice-based solutions—illustrates the industry's varied approaches to achieving post-quantum security.
