XRP Ledger Plans Quantum-Resistant Accounts With No Extra User Fees

The XRP Ledger Foundation has published a design that would let account owners attach a quantum-resistant signing key and disable their original key, with no increase in base transaction fees for users. The update landed Nov. 4 as part of the Foundation's 2027 protocol roadmap.

The threat the design addresses already exists on-chain. Every signed transaction exposes the public key the network uses to verify the owner's approval. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could work backward from that key to the private secret controlling the account. Any account that has ever sent a payment — including every exchange wallet — has already exposed its key.

Under the proposal, owners would install the new key first, then switch off the old one, closing the attack route an adversary could otherwise exploit.

Which standard does the new key use?

The design adopts ML-DSA-44, a signature scheme the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology approved in 2024 specifically to withstand quantum attacks. The scheme carries a heavier footprint than the ledger's current cryptography.

The key and signature together consume 3,732 bytes, against 105 bytes for a regular payment — roughly 3.6 KB of extra data per protected transaction. Counting history and database overhead, the Foundation estimates 5,331 bytes of storage per protected payment, compared with a 1,704-byte baseline.

Users would not pay for that difference. The proposal keeps the base fee unchanged, and because XRP Ledger fees are burned rather than collected, the operators running the network absorb the extra storage cost. The burden shifts to validators, not account holders.

What work remains before deployment?

Two engineering gaps still block the amendment. Developers are fixing a mismatch in which the Python prototype and the server and JavaScript implementations can generate different keys from the same starting seed. They have also not yet published tests of network behavior when all validators — the computers that agree on the ledger's history — run the new signatures.

The roadmap allocates $215,000 to $255,000 for review and auditing of this single amendment, plus 640 hours of development. Across all 24 amendments on the 2027 roadmap, the budget ranges from roughly $5 million to nearly $6 million.

When would migration happen?

The timeline spans three years. The Foundation has scheduled its migration study for the first half of 2027, with development and auditing to follow in late 2027 or 2028. Ripple, which maintains much of the ledger's core software, is targeting a full quantum transition by 2028.

For exchanges and custody providers holding exposed keys, the window matters: accounts that delay migration would keep a public key on-chain that a future quantum machine could target, while early movers face unfinished cross-implementation tooling.