Quantum-Safe Settlement

Every signature securing a public blockchain today rests on elliptic-curve cryptography, and NIST has already scheduled its retirement: classical 112-bit schemes are deprecated after 2030 and disallowed after 2035 (NIST IR 8547). For a settlement ledger the danger is not tomorrow's traffic but yesterday's record: a ledger publishes its public keys and signatures forever, so an adversary who later recovers old keys can sign new statements about old history. Regulators have begun asking institutions for migration plans now, not at the deadline.

What Aere Network settles differently

Chain 2800 is a public EVM Layer‑1 with sub-second deterministic finality on the validators (0.5-second block target, 0.620 s measured on 2026-10-15) whose block record carries post-quantum evidence bound under the block hash itself. Since block 13,014,000, every 32nd block (every 128th from block 17,225,968 to block 20,746,736, 2026-09-05 to 2026-09-29) header embeds a certificate of post-quantum signatures from the validator set over the parent block (Falcon‑512 at every anchor and, since 2026‑09‑04, SLH‑DSA‑SHA2‑128s as a second, hash-based scheme), and a 32-byte digest of that certificate sits inside the hashed part of the header. Strip or alter the certificate and it no longer matches that digest, so the anchor fails validation; the block hash itself does not change (aere-node SPEC.md, section 2.3; corrected 2026-10-27: this sentence said the block hash no longer verifies). From 2026‑08‑14 every validator enforced a minimum of three seals per anchor block (a node started from the published node package lowers that count to one seal, at the cost stated in aere-node SPEC.md 6.4; corrected 2026-10-27: this said every node); at block 14,961,456 (2026‑08‑21) the enforced minimum was raised to six of nine, as many as the quorum at that size; with ten validators from 2026-09-11, six sat below the quorum of seven until block 20,715,632 (2026‑09‑29) raised the minimum to seven, as many as the quorum of ten; below block 24,148,752 the seals proved those validators signed the block, not that it was decided (AIP-22 erratum, 2026-10-01), and from that block a certificate that carries the quorum of one round proves the decision.

Five post-quantum precompiles, four signature verifiers (Falcon‑512, Falcon‑1024, ML‑DSA‑44, SLH‑DSA‑128s) and the SHAKE256 hash function, run natively, live since block 9,189,161 and validated against NIST test vectors, so accounts and applications can bind authorization to post-quantum keys today, with no protocol change (corrected 2026-10-27: this sentence counted SHAKE256 among the verifiers).

Do not take our word for any of this

The claim above is checkable by anyone, against a public endpoint, in under a minute. The verifier below recomputes the binding digest independently, from raw RLP, and refuses politely when it does not match. It has a proven red path: pointed at pre-enforcement history it fails on thin certificates, and with a tampered domain string it fails on every digest.

Working with us

This is for institutions that need to show a regulator, an auditor or a board how their settlement record can move onto post-quantum evidence. An engagement starts with verification, not slides: your team runs the verifier against our chain, then we map your settlement flows onto post-quantum authorization together. The chain runs Ethereum's Prague and Osaka EVM rules (one exception: the EIP-4788 beacon-roots contract has no code), so existing tooling and wallets carry over.

Honest boundaries, stated up front: consensus on chain 2800 does not finalize an anchor block (every 32nd) without at least seven valid post-quantum validator seals, as many as the quorum of the ten validators, since block 20,715,632 on 2026-09-29 (Falcon-512, and since 2026-09-04 SLH-DSA as well; the minimum was three from 2026-08-14, f+1 of the nine validators of that time, and six from block 14,961,456 on 2026-08-21), with QBFT finalizing every block (corrected 2026-08-19: not a per-block quorum), its votes attributed by every validator, since block 24,300,000 (AIP-22 stage 4), only through their verified post-quantum seals (since block 25,080,000, AIP-22 stage 5, headers no longer carry ECDSA commit seals and are admitted on the Falcon-512 seal of their proposer alone; a commit still carries the ECDSA commit seal of its validator as an additional check); the validator set is Foundation-operated while the independent-operator program is built; and no external security audit has been completed yet. This page will state each change only after the chain itself shows it.