Sui Adds Quantum-Resistant Signatures, Existing Wallets Can Upgrade
Sui announced quantum-resistant signature support that lets holders upgrade existing accounts through their recovery phrases, according to an update the network shared on August 6. Users don’t have to create new wallets or move assets by hand, because the upgrade runs through the seed phrase that already backs each account.
How the upgrade works
Sui’s method reuses the recovery phrase, the same string of words people already store to restore a wallet. The network derives a new quantum-resistant key from that phrase, so an account keeps its identity after the switch. That’s the practical point of the design: existing users migrate without generating a fresh address or transferring balances between wallets.
Sui says the feature is available to current account holders. The announcement doesn’t spell out which post-quantum signature scheme Sui implemented, and it doesn’t give a hard deadline by which accounts must upgrade. Readers should treat the migration as optional for now unless Sui states otherwise in its technical documentation.
The threat Sui is preparingfor
Public-key cryptography secures Sui accounts today, and that class of math is the target for future quantum machines. A sufficiently large quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could derive a private key from its public counterpart, which would let an attacker forge signatures and drain funds. No quantum computer built so far can do this against production blockchain keys.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized its first post-quantum signature and encryption standards in August 2024, including ML-DSA (FIPS 204) for digital signatures and ML-KEM (FIPS 203) for key encapsulation. Those standards give blockchain developers concrete algorithms to build against rather than research proposals. Sui hasn’t confirmed publicly whether its signature upgrade uses ML-DSA or a different candidate.
The primary source for this report is Sui’s own announcement. A Cointelegraph post on X circulated the news the same day, but the network’s statement is the record to check for implementation specifics. Anyone planning to upgrade should confirm the supported algorithm and any wallet compatibility requirements directly in Sui’s developer documentation before migrating an account.