Headline: Ethereum researchers trade speed for safety — push to fast-track post-quantum defenses by 2027 A team of Ethereum researchers is willing to give up faster block times next year if it means accelerating the network’s defenses against future quantum attacks. Ethlabs on Wednesday withdrew its proposal to shorten block times from the planned 2027 Hegotá upgrade and posted on Ethereum Magicians — the forum where protocol designers coordinate — urging core developers to deprioritize other features and lock in post-quantum cryptography sooner. The group says that moving up the timeline could shave roughly 12 months off the community’s current schedule for quantum-resistant upgrades. The proposal is not binding and has not been added to Ethereum’s roadmap. But it highlights a pressing vulnerability: Ethereum accounts, wallets and smart contracts rely on public keys and their matching private signatures. Those public keys are visible on-chain, and a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, derive a private key from its public counterpart and drain funds from addresses holding ether, stablecoins or other tokens. The Ethereum Foundation’s quantum research team still maintains that such a quantum machine is not imminent. Nevertheless, replacing the cryptographic primitives used across wallets, dApps and validator nodes is a large engineering effort that can take years. Ethlabs wants the community to compress that timeline; the post notes a push to move defenses ahead of a current 2028 target. Separately, the Foundation’s protocol team set a December 2029 target in a September update. Next steps will depend on debate among core developers and coordinators. If accepted, the change would mean postponing throughput-focused upgrades in favor of an earlier, broad migration to post-quantum algorithms — a trade-off between immediate performance gains and long-term security against a future quantum threat. Read more AI-generated news on: https://app.chaingpt.org/news