Bison Bank and DK Bank are now testing post-quantum cryptographic wallets on a NEAR Protocol testnet, making them among the first traditional financial institutions to trial defenses against quantum computing attacks on digital assets.
The Responsible Fintech Institute and crypto custody provider Safeheron announced the pilot on Monday, bringing together banks from Europe alongside regulatory observers from three jurisdictions: Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office, and Malta’s Financial Services Authority. The setup is unusual. Banks will generate wallets and execute onchain transfers in a shared application environment while regulators watch from the sidelines during phase one, with plans to contribute to governance discussions later.
The technical underpinning matters here. The pilot uses a multiparty computation protocol that supports ML-DSA-65, one of three digital signature algorithms the US National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized in 2024 as post-quantum standards. NIST spent eight years vetting candidates before settling on these algorithms, which are designed to resist attacks from both classical computers and the theoretical large-scale quantum machines that could break current cryptographic schemes.
Why Traditional Finance Is Taking Quantum Threats Seriously
The timeline for quantum risk remains contested, but financial institutions are no longer treating it as science fiction. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has set 2030 as its target date for the territory’s banking sector to be “fully prepared” for quantum-related security risks. A Bank for International Settlements paper published in 2025 urged financial institutions to begin “coordinated, phased migrations” to post-quantum systems rather than waiting for a crisis.
What makes this pilot notable is the participation of actual banks rather than just crypto-native firms. Bison Bank, a Portuguese institution that received European crypto custody licenses in recent years, and DK Bank are putting real institutional workflows through the quantum-resistant infrastructure. This isn’t a proof-of-concept on a whiteboard.
The BIS paper laid out the stakes clearly: current public-key cryptography, including the elliptic curve cryptography that secures Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions, could be broken by sufficiently powerful quantum computers. The concern isn’t that such machines exist today. The concern is “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where adversaries record encrypted traffic today with the expectation of decrypting it once quantum capabilities mature. As we reported in May, some researchers believe the real quantum threat may be interbank traffic, not wallet keys, since institutional communications contain far more actionable information than individual transactions.
The Technical Architecture Under Test
The pilot’s choice of ML-DSA-65 reflects the current consensus on post-quantum standards. NIST approved three signature algorithms: ML-DSA (based on lattice cryptography), SLH-DSA (hash-based), and a third still undergoing finalization. ML-DSA-65 sits at the second security level, roughly equivalent to 128-bit classical security but with protection against quantum attacks.
Multiparty computation adds another layer. Rather than storing a complete private key in one location (a single point of failure), MPC protocols split key material across multiple parties that must cooperate to sign transactions. Combining MPC with post-quantum signatures creates a defense-in-depth approach: even if quantum attacks eventually threaten the signature scheme, an attacker would still need to compromise multiple key shares.
Safeheron’s involvement signals that this infrastructure could eventually plug into broader custody solutions. The company provides custody technology to institutions, and quantum-resistant MPC would address a growing concern among asset managers and banks evaluating digital asset custody.
NEAR Protocol serving as the testnet environment is a practical choice. NEAR’s architecture supports smart contract deployment and has an active developer ecosystem, making it suitable for prototyping without the gas costs of Ethereum mainnet. The organizers plan to open-source the underlying technology and publish a white paper covering protocol design and test findings.
What Regulators Are Actually Watching
The three regulatory bodies aren’t just lending their names to a press release. Abu Dhabi Global Market has positioned itself as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction with detailed virtual asset frameworks. Malta’s FSA was among the first European regulators to establish comprehensive crypto licensing. Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office represents a smaller but actively experimenting jurisdiction.
Their observation role in phase one makes sense from a regulatory-development perspective. Post-quantum cryptography is too new for regulators to write prescriptive rules. By observing actual implementations and participating in governance discussions later, these bodies can develop informed positions before quantum threats become acute.
This approach contrasts with how regulators have typically engaged with crypto innovation, often arriving after market practices have already calcified. The pilot structure suggests at least some regulators are trying to get ahead of the curve.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s 2030 deadline provides useful context for the timeline. That gives the industry roughly four years to develop, test, and deploy post-quantum systems before at least one major financial regulator expects full compliance. Whether quantum computers capable of breaking current cryptography will exist by then remains uncertain. Google’s quantum computing team warned in March that cryptocurrencies need post-quantum cryptography within three years, pointing to a 2029 horizon when quantum machines may reach cryptographically relevant scale.
The gap between optimistic and pessimistic quantum timelines spans decades, but the financial industry appears to be operating on the assumption that preparation should begin now. Migration to new cryptographic standards typically takes years. The shift from SHA-1 to SHA-256 stretched across more than a decade in some systems. Post-quantum migration will likely prove similarly drawn out.
For crypto protocols specifically, the challenge is compounded. Bitcoin’s cryptographic assumptions are baked into its consensus rules. Changing signature schemes would require network-wide coordination and potentially contentious governance decisions. Bitcoin developers floated a proposal in April to freeze coins vulnerable to quantum attacks, sparking debate about whether such intervention would violate user sovereignty.
The Ethereum Foundation has also adjusted its post-quantum roadmap, pivoting away from certain cryptographic primitives as the field evolves. These aren’t simple software updates. They touch the fundamental security properties that make blockchain systems trustworthy.
This pilot won’t solve those protocol-level challenges, but it does establish that the institutional custody layer can adopt post-quantum protections without waiting for base-layer changes. Banks and custodians could implement quantum-resistant key management around existing blockchain protocols, adding a buffer while the networks themselves prepare longer-term migrations.
The white paper the organizers plan to publish will matter. If it provides clear implementation guidance and demonstrates that post-quantum MPC is production-ready, it could accelerate adoption across the custody industry. If it surfaces unexpected challenges, at least those problems will be documented before institutions commit to large-scale deployments.
Regulators watching this pilot from Abu Dhabi, Malta, and Bhutan may end up shaping how post-quantum requirements are written into future licensing frameworks. For institutions tracking our derivatives dashboard or monitoring institutional flows, this is the kind of infrastructure development that doesn’t move prices today but could determine which custodians survive the quantum transition.
