AmericanFortress's ZK-PoSP scheme lets wallets prove seed ownership without revealing it, costing $0.002 per proof. Adoption depends on network upgrades and independent review.
AmericanFortress has released a post-quantum security scheme designed to protect existing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana wallet addresses without requiring holders to move funds or rotate their keys.
The company published the technical paper for Zero-Knowledge Proof of Seed Provenance – ZK-PoSP – through the International Association for Cryptologic Research’s ePrint archive. The scheme lets a wallet prove it knows the seed used to derive an address without revealing that seed. It would operate alongside existing signature systems, then replace the classical signing step if quantum computers become capable of attacking elliptic curve cryptography.
Bitcoin and Ethereum use the secp256k1 curve. Solana commonly uses Ed25519. ZK-PoSP covers both curves and hierarchical deterministic wallet standards, including BIP32 and SLIP-10.
AmericanFortress described the proposal as the first post-quantum approach that can preserve existing wallet addresses without forcing users to transfer assets, according to a statement shared with crypto.news.
ZK-PoSP relies on hash functions and the soundness of its zero-knowledge proof system. The paper says post-quantum security is “conjectured” because the underlying assumptions have not been tested against a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. No such machine exists today.
Sufficiently powerful quantum computers could theoretically use Shor’s algorithm to derive private keys from exposed public keys. Google’s Quantum AI team recently estimated that breaking 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography could require fewer than 1,500 logical qubits and tens of millions of quantum gates. Those are error-corrected logical qubits, not the noisier physical qubits available in present systems. The analysis does not indicate that Bitcoin or other networks face an immediate attack.
AmericanFortress said blockchains could implement ZK-PoSP by adding proof verification through a node-level software upgrade. Wallet providers would also need to generate the required proofs. Until a network adopts and enforces that verification, addresses with public keys already visible onchain would remain exposed to a future quantum attack.
Generating a one-time proof to secure an address costs about $0.002 on a 16-core server, according to the company. Each transaction proof costs roughly $0.00125. The current implementation takes about 12 seconds to sign a transaction, with verification requiring between nine and 10 milliseconds.
Those figures reflect computational tests cited by AmericanFortress, not the cost or performance of a live blockchain integration. A network upgrade could introduce additional storage, bandwidth, software, and coordination requirements.
“Today’s implementation is already practical for institutional settlement, and hardware acceleration and proving-system improvements will bring signing times down further,” CEO Michal “Mehow” Pospieszalski said.
The proofs use RISC Zero and do not require a trusted setup. AmericanFortress plans to license its software development kit to blockchains and other projects. Adoption would depend partly on commercial terms as well as independent technical review.
The proposal arrives as institutional interest in post-quantum security grows. Strategy, BlackRock, Coinbase, and six other companies recently formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium and pledged a combined $15 million over three years, as crypto.news reported. Post-quantum cryptography is the consortium’s first research focus. Members will decide independently which developers and organizations receive funding, and the group does not control Bitcoin development or endorse individual protocol changes.
For US-based Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, custodians, and corporate treasuries, avoiding mass wallet migration could reduce operational and legal complications. ZK-PoSP would provide no protection unless Bitcoin developers, miners, node operators, wallet companies, and users accepted the necessary changes.
Ethereum has pursued a separate path. The Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team in January and is testing hash-based signatures, a minimal zero-knowledge virtual machine, and migration tools, according to its quantum-security roadmap.
AmericanFortress’s proposal now faces the same central test as other security designs: independent cryptographic review, implementation audits, and sufficient network agreement to deploy it.
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