Your treasury,safe past
Q-Day.Your treasury,safe past
Q-Day.Your treasury,safe past
Q-Day.Your treasury,safe past
Q-Day.Your treasury,safe past
Q-Day.Your treasury,safe past
Q-Day.

An Ethereum account reveals its public key in its first signed transaction.¹ A quantum computer that can break secp256k1 could work back from that key to the private key, and spend what the account holds.

A Qanary treasury splits authority by risk. The keys a quantum computer could break get a small, leaking allowance and a fuse. The key that holds everything else is post-quantum from the start.

Explanation of the plate

Fig. 1. The cold key. The account’s root key is post-quantum: ML-DSA-44 or ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204), or Falcon-512. It can be derived in your browser from a recovery phrase, or live in an AWS KMS HSM. Only the cold key moves funds above the cap, changes modules, rotates keys or signs ERC-1271 messages.

Fig. 2. The hot key, under a leaking cap. A classical key, an ECDSA wallet or a passkey, spends through an executor with an allowlist: transfers of tracked assets, no approvals, no module changes. Its cap is a leaky bucket per asset that refills continuously, so nothing can be spent twice at a window boundary. The hot key never validates user operations and cannot sign ERC-1271 messages.

Fig. 3. The tripwire. An ownerless, one-way registry offers bounties on five curves whose private keys nobody knows: each public key is a public tag hashed to a curve point. secp160r1, P-192 and P-224 form the ladder, because a quantum computer breaks short curves before 256-bit ones. secp256k1 and P-256 stand for the key families in use.

When a rung is claimed, every account responds on its own. By default the hot cap halves at the first rung, drops to a tenth at the second, and the hot tier freezes at the third. A broken secp256k1 or P-256 disables that key family for good. Each account can choose a different response.

A claim is an ECDSA signature by the target key over the chain, the registry, the target and the claimant. It is bound to the claimant, so it cannot be front-run, and the bounty is paid to the claimant.

What the tripwire cannot do. A thief with a quantum computer may steal quietly instead of claiming. Cold funds rely on the post-quantum key, not on the tripwire.

Leaving an exposed wallet takes one batch: create the post-quantum account, revoke approvals, move the assets. EIP-7702 can carry the batch, but under 7702 the old key stays live, so the funds have to move.

Post-quantum signatures are large, and checking them is heavy work. Written in Solidity, every published verifier runs past what an ERC-4337 account may spend on validation. As Arbitrum Stylus programs, all three fit inside it, and all three are live on ApeChain, an Arbitrum Orbit chain that settles to Arbitrum One.

The verifiers are ERC-7913 contracts that any account can call. Qanary plugs into the smart-account stacks treasuries already use, and keeps keys where institutions already keep them.