Building the Quantum-Safe Bridge: QRL 2.0 Audit Ready Q1 2026

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The accelerating reduction in quantum timelines potentially bringing a CRQC into play as early as 2027 creates a distinct urgency for the blockchain industry. The vast majority of the crypto ecosystem’s value, utility, and development activity currently resides on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) chains that rely on vulnerable ECDSA protection.

As these quantum milestones are crossed, these ecosystems will need a viable destination to migrate to. One that guarantees security without sacrificing functionality.

This is the driving force behind QRL 2.0 (Codenamed Project Zond) and bringing the QRL 2.0 Testnet V2 release to Q1 2026, which is what auditors will use to perform their audit and forms the basis of our QRL 2.0 mainnet, to be released after the completion of the audit process.

The Acceleration of the Quantum Timelines

For years, the threat of quantum computers breaking encryption has been dismissed as a distant problem. That narrative collapsed in 2024 and 2025. While the exact arrival of a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) remains a subject of debate, the convergence of funding, algorithmic breakthroughs, and hardware milestones has shifted the timeline from “decades away” to a near-term concern demanding immediate action.

1. Governments are already actively planning: Standard bodies like NIST aren’t waiting for quantum computers to arrive. NIST finalized the first post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, effective January 2025, mandates preparation for cryptographic threats that don’t yet exist. US federal agencies are required by law to prepare for quantum migration. This isn’t precautionary theater. Cryptography operates on decades-long timelines, and replacing the foundations of global infrastructure is necessarily slow. By the time a CRQC emerges, it will be too late to start the migration. The regulatory acceleration reflects intelligence assessments that the threat is credible and approaching.
2. The “goalposts” have moved dramatically closer: Perhaps the most underappreciated factor is that we don’t just have better quantum computers coming, we need far fewer of them than previously thought to break encryption. In 2022, estimates suggested roughly 300 million physical qubits were needed to break ECC-256 encryption, the standard protecting most of the internet. By 2025, algorithmic optimizations by researchers like Craig Gidney and Daniel Litinski collapsed that requirement to 1 million physical qubits, a reduction of over 90%. This algorithmic compression alone may have brought Q-Day several years closer, completely independent of hardware improvements.
3. The focus has shifted to logical qubits. The industry has moved past simply counting physical qubits to focusing on logical qubits. High physical qubit counts mean nothing without high gate fidelity and coherence times. In December 2024, Google’s Willow processor demonstrated something many physicists consider the “Wright Brothers moment” of quantum computing by operating “below threshold” for quantum error correction. As they scaled their error correction lattice, the error rate dropped exponentially, by a factor of 2.14 with each step. They ran 10 billion error correction cycles without failure. This proved that the physics of fault-tolerant quantum computing is solved. What remains is an engineering problem: building bigger chips.
4. Investment is inflecting significantly. In 2025 alone, roughly $10 billion in fresh capital entered quantum computing, a 50% increase from the previous year. This isn’t speculative venture funding anymore. JPMorgan Chase committed $10 billion to quantum and frontier technologies as part of a broader $1.5 trillion security initiative. Companies like Quantinuum raised $600 million at $10 billion valuations. Whether driven by fundamentals or hype, this massive influx of capital, much of it from sovereign wealth funds and banks operating on national security timelines, significantly de-risks the R&D required to make the technology viable. The “quantum winter” scenario where funding dries up before breakthroughs materialize is effectively off the table. Major players like Google, Microsoft, and IBM remain heavily invested, with clear roadmaps through the end of the decade.
5. AI is acting as an accelerant. Quantum development isn’t happening in a vacuum, it’s drafting behind the AI boom. Google’s Willow breakthrough relied partly on reinforcement learning agents that decode error signals in real-time and tune thousands of control parameters to keep qubits stable. Q-CTRL uses AI to solve key computational bottlenecks in error suppression. Further to this, the AI investment cycle has conditioned the market to fund exponential technologies with massive upfront costs, ensuring the capital tap for quantum remains open while also creating infrastructure (cooling, power, networking) that quantum computers will inherit.
6. Projections for breaking ECC have tightened to 2028-2033. Based on the roadmaps of major quantum firms, the industry expects to reach the capability to breach ECC-256 between 2027 and 2033.

The data indicates that the “quantum moment” is approaching faster than anticipated. When that moment arrives, legacy chains will face an existential crisis. The demand for a secure ecosystem will be immediate, and there will be no time to retrofit decades-old cryptographic foundations.

The migration must happen now, while there’s still runway. This is why QRL 2.0 (Codenamed Project Zond) exists: to build quantum-resistant infrastructure before the threat materializes, not after. The window for proactive defense is open, but it’s closing faster than most realize.

The Systemic Risk to the EVM

There’s a lot on the line, and the sheer scale of the EVM ecosystem makes this a systemic risk. To say the blockchain world runs on the EVM is an understatement. The EVM isn’t just one blockchain — it’s the foundation of the entire crypto economy. Ethereum itself secures over $300 billion in market capitalization, but that’s only the beginning. The EVM architecture has become the de-facto standard for smart contract platforms, spawning dozens of major Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks including Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Chain, Avalanche C-Chain, and countless others. Combined, these EVM-compatible chains represent hundreds of billions in bridged total value locked, host millions of active users daily, and power the overwhelming majority of DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, gaming ecosystems, and real-world asset tokenization platforms. Every DeFi transaction, every NFT mint, and every DAO vote is currently protected by the same quantum-vulnerable cryptographic signature: ECDSA.

For these thousands of projects, migrating to a quantum-safe environment is not a simple “lift and shift” operation; it’s a monumental undertaking fraught with technical, economic, and existential risk.

QRL 2.0: A Quantum-Safe Haven for Blockchain

QRL is currently a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain running since genesis in early 2018 and has been running without issues since. This is a testament to the QRL team’s commitment to resiliance.

QRL 2.0 (Codenamed Project Zond) is a pioneering Layer-1 blockchain and the successor to QRL, meticulously engineered from Ethereum’s proven foundation with Proof-of-Stake and EVM familiarity. It’s already been in development for years with the public devnet pre-release in 2022, beta-testnet in 2024, Testnet V1 in 2025, and finally, Testnet V2 in 2026 with a push for an audit.

We have designed QRL 2.0 to serve as a safe haven for the broader crypto economy. By being EVM-friendly, we’ve removed the friction that typically prevents migration. The data indicates that the “quantum moment” is approaching faster than anticipated. By building off of a familiar foundation, institutions can trust that just like with QRL, QRL 2.0 will have a long future ahead.

Recalibrating our Roadmap

Given the accelerating quantum timeline and the systemic risk facing the EVM ecosystem, we are adjusting our roadmap to prioritize speed and reliability. If you have been following the development of QRL 2.0, you will notice two strategic shifts designed to ensure we meet the Q1 2026 target:

• Committing to definitive timelines: As development matures and the “cone of uncertainty” narrows, we are now able to provide concrete dates. Unlike earlier phases where flexibility was required, the urgency of the quantum threat demands precision. We are carefully locking in official dates—specifically the push for the QRL 2.0 Testnet V2 in Q1 2026—so that auditors and the community can plan accordingly.
• Streamlining algorithm implementation: To meet this accelerated launch window, we are prioritizing the integration of ML-DSA (Dilithium), ensuring full NIST compliance in our address and consensus layers at launch. Consequently, we are rescheduling the implementation of SLH-DSA to post-mainnet. Because the QRL 2.0 address model is inherently crypto-agile, SLH-DSA, and other future signature algorithms, can be seamlessly integrated after the network is live. This approach allows us to launch a secure, audit-ready chain without unnecessary delays.

Evolution Favors the Prepared

History shows us that in cryptography, being early is the only way to be on time. The convergence of AI, hardware capitalization, and algorithmic optimization suggests that the “quantum winter” for legacy blockchains is approaching rapidly. The question is no longer if quantum computers will break current cryptography, but where the industry will be when they do. We’re ensuring there’s a viable answer.

The future is quantum. The foundation must be resilient to that too.

QRL has been quantum-resistant since 2018. QRL 2.0 brings that same uncompromising security standard to the EVM ecosystem, without the friction that typically prevents institutional adoption.

This isn’t speculation. This is seven years of proven resilience meeting the urgency of an accelerating threat.