--- title: "Two small banks are testing quantum-resistant transfers, which is how a migration starts" description: "Bison Bank and DK Bank will generate wallets and move assets on a testnet using a NIST post-quantum signature standard, watched by regulators in Abu Dhabi, Bhutan and Malta. Nobody is migrating the banking system this week." category: "Crypto" category_url: https://boursel.com/category/crypto author: "Marcus Feldman" published: 2026-08-24T07:37:37.000Z updated: 2026-08-24T07:37:37.000Z canonical: https://boursel.com/article/two-small-banks-are-testing-quantum-resistant-transfers-which-is-how-a-migration tags: ["quantum", "cryptography", "nist", "banking", "custody", "regulation"] --- # Two small banks are testing quantum-resistant transfers, which is how a migration starts Bison Bank and DK Bank will generate wallets and move assets on a testnet using a NIST post-quantum signature standard, watched by regulators in Abu Dhabi, Bhutan and Malta. Nobody is migrating the banking system this week. Two banks and three regulators have started a pilot to test cryptography designed to survive quantum computers. [Bison Bank and DK Bank will test wallet generation and transfers in a shared application environment](https://cointelegraph.com/news/banks-regulators-quantum-resistant-crypto-pilot), watched by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan's Gelephu Financial Services Office and Malta's Financial Services Authority, who will observe the first phase and join a governance workstream later. It was organized by the Responsible Fintech Institute and Safeheron, a crypto custody infrastructure provider. The scale should be stated before anything else. These are small institutions and small jurisdictions, not the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank or the SEC. The work runs on a testnet. The deliverables so far are a white paper and an intention to open-source the technology later. That is not a criticism. It is what an early pilot looks like, and post-quantum migration is a large enough engineering problem that it will be done in pilots for years before it is done in production. ## What the threat actually is The signatures that prove ownership of a crypto wallet, and much of the encryption underneath ordinary banking, rest on mathematical problems that are hard for conventional computers and would be far easier for a sufficiently capable quantum computer. Whether and when such a machine exists is not something anyone knows, and this piece will not offer a date. Published estimates differ by decades and the people making them have varying interests in the answer. What makes the timing question less decisive than it sounds is a problem usually called harvest now, decrypt later. An adversary can record encrypted traffic today, store it, and decrypt it whenever the capability arrives. Any data whose value outlasts the wait is therefore already exposed, which means the timing of the defense and the timing of the threat are separate questions. You have to move before you know. ## Why crypto assets are a sharper case than most Two features make a blockchain wallet more exposed than a bank account. The first is concentration. A wallet's security rests almost entirely on one signature scheme. There is no fraud department, no reversal, and no institution standing behind the balance. If the signature scheme fails, the holdings go. The second is visibility. Addresses and balances sit in public on the ledger, permanently. A conventional attacker has to find a target; here the targets are enumerated, and a large dormant address is a durable object that will still be there whenever the capability to attack it arrives. ## The standard being tested The pilot uses ML-DSA-65 on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet. ML-DSA is the [Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard, published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as FIPS 204 in August 2024](https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography), alongside FIPS 203 for key encapsulation and FIPS 205, a hash-based signature standard. A digital signature scheme lets the holder of a private key prove they authorized something without revealing the key. A standard means the algorithm has been through public analysis and been endorsed by a technical authority, which matters more than usual here, because cryptography that has not been attacked by competent people for years is not yet known to be strong. NIST has also set a schedule. Under NIST IR 8547 it intends to deprecate and ultimately remove quantum-vulnerable algorithms from its standards by 2035, with higher-risk systems moving sooner. That is the number worth holding on to, because it converts an open-ended physics question into a compliance deadline, and compliance deadlines are what actually move institutions. ## The part that will be hard Replacing a signature scheme is not a software update. It touches key management, custody, hardware security modules, every counterparty that has to verify what you sign, and every archive of signed material that has to remain verifiable afterwards. Post-quantum signatures are also generally larger than the ones they replace, which has consequences for anything that stores or transmits them at scale, a blockchain included. The account also cites a Hong Kong Monetary Authority target of being fully prepared for quantum-related security risks by 2030, and a 2025 Bank for International Settlements paper urging coordinated, phased migration. Neither is reachable to us directly here, so both are reported as they appear in that account. Two small banks on a testnet do not change any of this. They do produce something the industry currently lacks, which is evidence about what breaks when you actually try it.