Soundness

Building sound quantum-proof digital wealth.

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

We are closing Soundness Labs...

We started as a ZK infrastructure team, building circuits, working with the @SuiNetwork and @ligero_inc teams on proof systems, contributing to the @WalrusProtocol, and exploring what zero-knowledge could do at the base layer of blockchains. Over time that work pointed us toward a harder and more urgent problem: most of the ecosystem is secured by cryptography that breaks under quantum pressure, and nobody was building the migration path. So we pivoted.

The last year was spent building a working PQ protection layer for EdDSA and ECDSA wallets, covering self-custody, MPC, and HSM accounts across different chains. Coinbase's quantum advisory board named us the only team with a deployed product for their Strategy 1 migration path.

The problem is real. The technology works but the market is not ready.

Chains and wallet providers are now building internal research teams to assess this in-house, and the coordination problem between them has no clear resolution date. Wallets wait for chains. Chains are usually too slow for deep changes like PQ migration.

All our repositories stay public at https://t.co/p3ksiEz4y4. If you are building in this space, use anything you find useful.

Thank you to our advisors, our community, our backers, and everyone who showed up for this. It meant more than we showed.

Thank you for believing in Soundness.
Thank you for testing with us.
Thank you for building with us.

Most of all, thank you for being here.

The Soundness Team 💙

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

https://t.co/pfmUNmv7Bc

https://t.co/cFwAq04f43

[Sreeram Kannan @sreeramkannan]

https://t.co/Q8Ub4kQXDv

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

The most dangerous thing Google published this year wasn't a quantum circuit --> it was a ZK proof that a better quantum circuit existed without sharing the circuit.
A few months later, students with AI agents started reconstructing it!

Think about how fast the progresses whould be now?!
Not because Bitcoin is about to break, but because frontier cryptography research is turning into an open internet challenge powered by AI agents.
The age of "only experts can contribute" is ending and Q-day might be sooner than what expected.
Read more 👇

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

10/ The prototype is built on Google Longfellow-ZK work using Sumcheck + Ligero-style proofs.

Current benchmark on Apple M1:
→ ~87 ms proving
→ ~65 ms verification
→ 226 KB proofs

For more updates follow us.

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

Legacy systems have been our cryptographic backbone for decades.
One challenge in the PQ transition is finding approaches that integrate cleanly into the systems & flows already used today.
That’s what @Mahdi_seda from @SoundnessLabs discussed at the PQTS #7 call last week. 🧵

[asanso @asanso]

https://t.co/Y7lw5ySubu

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

9/ The current implementation is a WiP and its today what we have done till now are.
→ standalone prover: done
→ hidden-key circuit: done
→ wallet demo: live here https://t.co/Zh82nrf5GW
→ on-chain verifier optimization: ongoing
Here is the link to our repo: https://t.co/Q7b1DGs1Mb

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

@DanielEdekhe @Mahdi_seda With a high chance yes, and it will be here: https://t.co/W4tMbovRWd

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

Every quantum migration plan you have heard requires new addresses, a hard fork, or moving your assets somewhere else.
Come find out more tomorrow at zkSummit14 in Rome.
At 16:15 mainstage, @Mahdi_seda presents:
“Proof of Seed: ZK-Based Quantum Migration Without Address Changes”

[Zero Knowledge Podcast @zeroknowledgefm]

zkSummit14 is happening in Rome on May 7th!

Once again, we bring together the researchers, cryptographers, and builders in ZK for a day to catchup on the most cutting edge ideas in our space.

We are about to sell out, so apply & get your ticket asap!
https://t.co/1GBDTBMuoM

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

9/
While other teams are only generating FUD around PQ transitions, Soundness is focused on building the only practical path forward.
Let's keep shipping. 🐬

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

The Coinbase Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain dropped a 50-page report on April 21.
Section 4.3 walks through four strategies for migrating execution-layer signatures to PQ.
Only one strategy gets a deployed example, by @SoundnessLabs

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

https://t.co/1p4q56d5T8

[Soundness @SoundnessLabs]

8/
Why this matters even after chains add native PQ signatures:
Existing addresses still need to be bound to new PQ keys. Strategy 1 is the only path that does this without forcing asset migration.
It is also the only way to protect dormant accounts.