XRP Ledger Proposal Maps a Path to Quantum-Resistant Accounts

The XRP Ledger Foundation is proposing quantum-resistant signatures for account holders. The change aims to protect the network against a future generation of powerful quantum computers. The design is under development and has not yet been deployed as a finished network upgrade.

Under the proposal described by BigGo Finance, an account holder could add a new signing key based on ML-DSA-44 and disable the existing key. ML-DSA is a digital-signature standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2024.

A signature lets the network verify that an account owner authorized a transaction. Today’s cryptography relies on mathematical problems that conventional computers cannot practically reverse. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could threaten some of those assumptions, although such an attack is a future risk rather than evidence that XRP Ledger accounts have already been broken.

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Larger Signatures, More Storage

Quantum-resistant signatures come with a practical cost: the keys and signatures are much larger. The foundation’s estimates cited by BigGo put their combined size at 3,732 bytes for a protected payment, compared with 105 bytes for a conventional payment.

Including transaction history and database overhead, estimated storage rises to 5,331 bytes per protected payment from a 1,704-byte baseline. Those are estimates for a standard payment, not a measurement of a completed network-wide deployment.

The proposal does not raise the base transaction fee, meaning network operators would absorb additional storage and bandwidth under that design. Whether fees should eventually reflect transaction size remains an open question, according to the report. The current base fee should not be treated as a permanent guarantee of the final fee structure.

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Migration and Testing Remain

Moving an existing account would require registering a new key and disabling the old one. If the old key remains usable, it could preserve the exposure the upgrade is intended to remove. Another possible route is to create a new quantum-resistant account and move assets to it.

The engineering work is unfinished. BigGo reports that developers are resolving differences in key generation between implementations and that testing of validators using the new scheme has not been published. A migration study is planned for the first half of 2027, with development and auditing scheduled later.

Ripple has separately discussed a goal of transitioning XRP Ledger signatures to quantum-resistant methods by 2028. That is a target, not a guaranteed completion date; implementation, testing, adoption and migration all remain ahead.

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What It Means for XRP Holders

The proposal deals with account security on the XRP Ledger, the network on which XRP operates. It does not itself change the token’s supply, establish a price target or mean holders need to move funds today.

The trade-off to watch is whether the network can introduce stronger signature options while managing larger data requirements and giving users a workable migration path. Any final procedure will depend on the adopted specification and support from wallets and other infrastructure.