TechFlow news, March 9: According to a report by Decrypt, Project Eleven’s latest research indicates that if blockchains migrate to post-quantum cryptography, the address-generation methods currently widely used by cryptocurrency exchanges may become inoperative.
Exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance currently rely on hierarchical deterministic wallets (BIP32 standard), a system that allows operators to generate new deposit addresses using public keys stored on servers while keeping private keys securely offline in cold storage. However, researchers found that this architecture may not function under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s post-quantum digital signature standard, ML-DSA. Conor Deegan, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Project Eleven, stated that if Bitcoin adopts ML-DSA without employing a similar construction, the system would lose its non-hardened derivation capability, preventing exchanges, payment processors, and others from generating new receiving addresses using only public keys.
