Banks and financial regulators across several jurisdictions have joined a new pilot testing whether post-quantum cryptography can function inside practical digital-asset workflows. Convened by the Responsible Fintech Institute with Safeheron as technology partner, the initiative moves quantum-resistant wallet infrastructure from research into supervised institutional testing, covering wallet generation and on-chain transfers.
Participants include Bison Bank and DK Bank, while Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office and the Malta Financial Services Authority are participating as regulatory stakeholders. The cross-jurisdiction structure is designed to test governance, interoperability and operational resilience alongside cryptographic performance, rather than treating quantum readiness solely as an engineering problem.
ML-DSA-65 Meets Multi-Party Wallet Infrastructure
The technical core combines Multi-Party Computation with ML-DSA-65, one of the parameter sets standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology under FIPS 204. NIST describes ML-DSA as a digital-signature standard believed to remain secure even against adversaries equipped with large-scale quantum computers. ML-DSA-65 therefore gives the pilot a standardized post-quantum foundation rather than an experimental proprietary signature scheme.
Testing will take place on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet and will cover wallet creation and on-chain transfers. Organizers are considering a non-custodial 2-of-2 MPC architecture in which two independent components participate in authorization. That structure is intended to preserve institutional control while avoiding dependence on one complete signing key held by a single party.
Signature size remains one of the practical constraints facing post-quantum systems. NIST’s FIPS 204 specification places an ML-DSA-65 signature at 3,309 bytes, substantially larger than signatures used by many current blockchain systems. That makes bandwidth, latency and processing overhead central questions for the pilot, particularly if the technology is eventually expected to support high-volume financial transactions.
The organizers have cited efficiency improvements in their implementation, but the reported roughly 69% reduction in signature size should be treated as a pilot-specific performance claim until technical results are published. The initiative plans to release a white paper covering protocol design and testing findings, giving outside researchers a clearer basis for evaluating those performance claims.
Regulatory Participation Tests More Than Cryptography
The project is also structured to examine how banks and regulators could coordinate a future migration away from cryptography vulnerable to quantum attacks. Regulatory participants will initially observe the technical phase and are expected to contribute later to a governance workstream. That model recognizes that quantum migration will require standards for control, auditability and responsibility in addition to stronger algorithms.
Safeheron says the underlying protocol technology is ultimately intended to be open-sourced, allowing independent review and security auditing. The stronger signal from the pilot is therefore not that post-quantum banking infrastructure is already production-ready, but that regulated institutions are beginning to test how such systems could operate before migration becomes urgent.
