Hardy Index Quantum readiness, rated and tracked

Chain profile

Chiliz Chain

CHZ Exposed

Accounts and validator block seals on Chiliz Chain sign with ECDSA on secp256k1, and no post-quantum proposal, plan or research programme for its signatures could be found from Chiliz or its validator governance.

Is Chiliz Chain quantum-safe?

No. Chiliz Chain, the EVM layer 1 with chain ID 88888 that Chiliz built for sports and entertainment, is a fork of BNB Smart Chain, which is itself a go-Ethereum fork. Accounts sign transactions with ECDSA on the secp256k1 curve, and its validators, a set of thirteen block producers under Proof of Staked Authority, seal each block with a secp256k1 signature. A new validator has to be approved by the existing validators, and governance votes are cast by validator owners. A sufficiently large quantum computer running Shor's algorithm would break every one of these signatures. Chiliz Chain activated the Cancun and Pectra hard forks on 30 June 2026, bringing EIP-7702 delegation and a P-256 verification precompile, but neither is post-quantum and neither retires an account's ECDSA key. We found no post-quantum position from Chiliz: nothing in its documentation, its governance proposals, its node repository or its blog. BNB Chain's ML-DSA-44 testing is BNB Chain's work, not Chiliz's, and Chiliz has not said it will adopt it. CHZ also exists as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum and as bridged tokens on Base and Solana, where it is protected by those chains' signatures rather than Chiliz Chain's.

Where we are making a judgement call Four judgement calls. The first concerns scope and control rather than score. Chiliz Chain is rated as a layer 1 because it runs its own Parlia consensus on a live public mainnet, but its validator set is permissioned: a new validator needs ten million CHZ and the approval of the existing validators, governance votes are cast by validator owners, and the documentation itself says Proof of Staked Authority trades some decentralisation for speed. That governance has used its control over supply: the Pepper8 proposal, submitted by the Chiliz Group and applied in 2025, minted CHZ through an irregular state transition into a single address to absorb Paribu Net. We found no separate admin key over minting, fees or validators, but a reader should know that a small, approved validator set controls all three. That finding should be read beside CIP-051, a proposal put to the validators with a voting deadline of 28 September 2026, which would upgrade the system contracts to v5.0.3 and, in its own words, "removes dangerous administrative functions": Staking.fixValidatorEpoch(), which could rewrite historical stake totals, and ChainConfig.setEpochBlockInterval() are deleted. The proposal does not say who could call them, and we found no published record of whether it passed. A reader who treats an approved validator set as outside the index would leave Chiliz Chain out rather than score it differently; every signature scored here is the chain's own, and each is classical. The second is upstream work. Chiliz Chain forks BNB Smart Chain, whose core team tested ML-DSA-44 and published the cost; we do not credit that to Chiliz, because Chiliz has not referred to it. A reader who does would place Chiliz Chain in Tier 4 with a deployment score of 2 and might score NIST alignment 5 as the BNB Chain profile does, which would raise the Hardy Score from 8.5 to 18.5. The third is migration. The score of 2 rather than 1 credits the record of validator-approved hard forks and the practice of merging upstream changes; at 1 the Hardy Score would be 7.0. EIP-7702 is not credited, because a delegated account still obeys its original ECDSA key; a reader who counts it as account abstraction would score migration 3 and a Hardy Score of 10.0. The fourth concerns CHZ on other chains: CHZ is also an ERC-20 on Ethereum and a bridged token on Base and Solana, and none of those copies is scored here.

At a glance

On mainnet today

ECDSA on secp256k1 for accounts and validator block seals; P-256 verification available to contracts

Post-quantum scheme

None. No post-quantum scheme has been proposed, selected or tested for Chiliz Chain.

NIST standard

None adopted.

Readiness tier

Tier 5: Exposed. The signatures securing funds on mainnet today are quantum-vulnerable, and no public post-quantum plan, proposal or research programme addressing them could be found.

Cryptography in use

  • Account signatures ECDSA on secp256k1 Mainnet, default Sender recovery through go-ethereum's signer in v2.9.5, the client version Chiliz Chain's public mainnet RPC reported on 22 October 2026. EIP-7702 delegation, live since 30 June 2026, still authorises through the account's ECDSA key. Source code or release
  • Validator consensus ECDSA on secp256k1 Mainnet, mandatory Parlia recovers each block's sealer with crypto.Ecrecover on secp256k1. The client carries BNB Smart Chain's BLS vote-attestation code, but Chiliz's mainnet configuration does not activate the Luban fork that turns it on. Source code or release
  • Contract level ECDSA on secp256r1 Mainnet, opt-in P-256 verification precompile in the Prague precompile set, active on mainnet since the Pectra hard fork of 30 June 2026. Source code or release

A role not listed is not evidenced either way. Every scheme, and which other chains share it, is in the cryptography registry.

Score breakdown

Each dimension scored 0 to 10. The weight beside it is its share of the total score.
Signature scheme 0 30% Deployment stage 1 25% NIST alignment 0 15% Migration path 2 15% Exposure 2 10% Verification 2 5%
Show the weighted arithmetic and the sourced note for each dimension
No. Dimension Score Weight Contribution
1 Signature scheme 0 30% 0.0
2 Deployment stage 1 25% 2.5
3 NIST alignment 0 15% 0.0
4 Migration path 2 15% 3.0
5 Exposure 2 10% 2.0
6 Verification 2 5% 1.0
Hardy Score 8.5

1 Signature scheme 0/10, weighted 30%

Band 0: Classical signatures only on mainnet, with nothing post-quantum protecting live funds. Short-lived devnets and one-off benchmarks sit here: they demonstrate research rather than something a user can hold keys on.

Chiliz Chain recovers every transaction sender with ECDSA on secp256k1 through the go-ethereum signer it inherits, and Parlia recovers each block's sealer with the same curve. The P-256 precompile that arrived with Pectra verifies another elliptic curve. Nothing post-quantum protects CHZ or any asset on Chiliz Chain. source

2 Deployment stage 1/10, weighted 25%

Band 1: Tier 5: Exposed.

Tier 5: Exposed. The signatures protecting funds and sealing blocks are quantum-vulnerable, and no Chiliz governance proposal, documentation page, blog post or research programme on post-quantum signatures for Chiliz Chain was found. BNB Chain's ML-DSA testing belongs to the upstream chain Chiliz forks, which has no authority over Chiliz Chain. source

3 NIST alignment 0/10, weighted 15%

Band 0 to 2: No post-quantum scheme named for the chain’s fund-protecting signatures, or a proprietary scheme with no public cryptanalysis.

No post-quantum scheme has been named for Chiliz Chain's account or validator signatures, so there is nothing to assess against a NIST standard. source

Placement in the band The floor of the band rather than a 1 or a 2: nobody with authority over Chiliz Chain has named a scheme at all, even as an example. BNB Chain tested ML-DSA-44, but crediting it would score the upstream chain rather than Chiliz.

4 Migration path 2/10, weighted 15%

Band 0 to 2: No agreed migration path, or the proposals on the table would strand or freeze holder funds.

No migration plan or published position exists. Chiliz Chain does have a working route for protocol change: it has activated a series of hard forks, Dragon8 in 2024 and Pepper8 in 2025, each after a successful validator governance proposal, Snake8 in October 2025, and Cancun and Pectra on 30 June 2026, and Chiliz merges BNB Smart Chain's and Ethereum's changes into its client. Nothing has been proposed to carry a post-quantum scheme through that process, and EIP-7702 delegation leaves an account's original ECDSA key in control. source

Placement in the band The top of the band rather than a 0 or a 1: the chain has a record of coordinated hard forks approved by validator governance, and its practice of merging upstream changes gives it a path to reuse work done on BNB Smart Chain or Ethereum. Not a 3, because Chiliz has not acknowledged the quantum problem in public, let alone described a route for holders.

5 Exposure 2/10, weighted 10%

Band 0 to 2: Public keys are exposed for effectively all accounts, or a large, measured share of total supply sits in exposed addresses.

Chiliz Chain keeps Ethereum's account model: an address is a hash of the public key, so an account that has never signed keeps its key private. Every account that has sent a transaction has published its key, and because Chiliz Chain accepts the same keys and addresses as Ethereum, a key published on any EVM chain exposes the same address here. Validator signer addresses are recovered from every block seal. source

Placement in the band The top of the band rather than a 1: never-signed addresses keep their keys hidden. Not a 3, because almost all economically active CHZ sits behind a key that has signed, here or on another EVM chain, and no measurement of the unexposed share has been published.

6 Verification 2/10, weighted 5%

Band 0 to 2: No post-quantum component exists, or the claims rest on marketing.

No post-quantum component exists for Chiliz Chain: no code, specification or testnet implementation was found in the node repository or the documentation. The node is open source, published as releases ported from a private development repository, but under v1.8 the openness of classical code earns nothing on this dimension. source

Placement in the band The top of the band rather than a 0 or a 1: there is nothing post-quantum to verify, but nothing about Chiliz Chain is marketed as quantum-safe, so its position does not rest on marketing.

The deployment dimension is not a separate judgement. It is Tier 5 expressed as a number. See the tier mapping.

How it compares

All 80 rated chains on the 0 to 100 scale. Chiliz Chain is marked. Select any point to open that profile.
Chiliz 8.5

Nearest chains in the ranking

The 9 chains Chiliz sits among, out of 80 rated. The last column is the gap in Hardy points from Chiliz.

Rank Chain Tier Hardy vs CHZ
53 Arweave 5: Exposed 8.5 level
54 Avalanche 5: Exposed 8.5 level
55 Bitcoin SV 5: Exposed 8.5 level
56 Celestia 5: Exposed 8.5 level
57 Chiliz Chain this chain 5: Exposed 8.5
58 Conflux 5: Exposed 8.5 level
59 dYdX Chain 5: Exposed 8.5 level
60 eCash 5: Exposed 8.5 level
61 Filecoin 5: Exposed 8.5 level

Roadmap

  1. October 2025 shipped

    The Snake8 hard fork activates, changing how block producers are selected and rewarded. It changes no signature scheme. source

  2. 30 June 2026 shipped

    Chiliz Chain 2.8.1 activates the Cancun and Pectra hard forks on mainnet, bringing EIP-7702 delegation for existing accounts and a P-256 verification precompile. Neither is post-quantum. source

  3. No published position proposed

    No post-quantum governance proposal, roadmap, research programme or testnet implementation for Chiliz Chain's signatures was found from Chiliz or its validator governance at the time of writing. source

If holders never migrate

No stated policy

Neither Chiliz nor Chiliz Chain's validator governance has said anything about post-quantum migration, so nothing has been said about accounts that never move to post-quantum keys.

As of 22 October 2026. Published beside the score, not in it. Every chain's stance is compared on the commitments page.

Exposure

Exposure measures how much of the chain's value already sits behind a public key that an attacker can record today and break later. This is the part of the threat that a future upgrade cannot undo.

Chiliz Chain uses Ethereum's address model: an address is the last twenty bytes of the Keccak hash of the public key, so an account that has received CHZ but never sent a transaction has not published its key. The opening signature publishes it permanently, and almost every account of consequence has signed. Because Chiliz Chain accepts the same keys and addresses as Ethereum, a holder who has signed with the same key on Ethereum or any other EVM chain has a published key on Chiliz Chain too, even if the Chiliz account has never sent a transaction. Validator signer addresses are recovered from every block seal. Fan Tokens moved from the Chiliz Legacy Chain to Chiliz Chain by migration in 2023, and Paribu Net's balances arrived in 2025 through a governance-approved state transition rather than a shared history, so the exposure inheritance rule does not apply. CHZ held as an ERC-20 on Ethereum, or as bridged tokens on Base and Solana, is protected by those chains' signatures, not Chiliz Chain's, and its exposure belongs to their profiles.

What this rating means for you

If you hold Chiliz

Chiliz runs quantum-vulnerable signatures with no published post-quantum plan that we could find. Nothing here is urgent today, and there is also nothing scheduled to change it.

Editorial guidance from the Hardy Index.

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Questions

Is Chiliz Chain quantum-safe?

No. Chiliz Chain accounts sign with ECDSA on secp256k1 and validators seal blocks with secp256k1 signatures, and a sufficiently large quantum computer would break both. Nothing post-quantum protects CHZ on mainnet today, and Chiliz has published no plan to change that.

Does BNB Chain's post-quantum testing apply to Chiliz Chain?

Not as it stands. Chiliz Chain is a fork of BNB Smart Chain and merges its changes, but BNB Chain's ML-DSA-44 work was a test on a non-production network, and Chiliz has not said it will adopt any of it. It would take a Chiliz hard fork, approved by its validators, to bring a post-quantum signature to Chiliz Chain.

Does EIP-7702 on Chiliz Chain help with migration?

No. Chiliz Chain activated EIP-7702 with its Pectra hard fork on 30 June 2026. It lets an existing account delegate to contract code, but the account's original ECDSA key still controls it, so delegation adds smart-account features rather than a route off a vulnerable key.

Who decides on changes to Chiliz Chain?

Its validators. Governance follows Compound's Alpha model with votes cast by validator owners in proportion to their delegated stake and a two-thirds quorum, and a new validator joins after the existing validators approve it. The Dragon8 and Pepper8 hard forks were each approved by a governance proposal before they were applied.

Are CHZ public keys already exposed?

For almost all CHZ in use, yes. A Chiliz Chain address is a hash of the key and hides it until the account signs, but active accounts have transacted, and a key that has signed on Ethereum or another EVM chain is also visible for the same address on Chiliz Chain. CHZ held as an ERC-20 on Ethereum falls under Ethereum's signatures and Ethereum's profile.

Sources

  1. Chiliz Chain node client Chiliz Chain (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  2. Chiliz Chain v2.9.5 release Chiliz Chain (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  3. Transaction signing (core/types/transaction_signing.go, v2.9.5) Chiliz Chain (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  4. Parlia consensus engine (consensus/parlia/parlia.go, v2.9.5) Chiliz Chain (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  5. Chiliz mainnet genesis configuration (config/embedded/chiliz.json, v2.9.5) Chiliz Chain (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  6. Precompiled contracts (core/vm/contracts.go, v2.9.5) Chiliz Chain (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  7. About Chiliz Chain Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  8. How to Become a Validator Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  9. Governance Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  10. Governance Proposals & Decisions Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  11. February 2025: New Validator Proposals Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  12. August 2025: Pepper8 Proposal Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  13. October 2025: Snake8 Hard Fork Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  14. Blockchain code changes Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  15. About Bridging Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  16. About Fan Tokens Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  17. EIP-7702: Set Code for EOAs Ethereum Improvement Proposals · primary · checked 22 October 2026
  18. September 2026: Sherlock Audit Remediation Proposal (CIP-051) Chiliz Chain documentation · primary · checked 22 October 2026
Cite this rating

A rating is only true as of the day an editor last reviewed it, so both forms below carry that date and the methodology version, with the date its cited sources were last checked. If you are quoting the score, quote those too.

Plain text

The Hardy Index (2026). Chiliz Chain: quantum readiness assessment. Hardy Score 8.5 of 100, Tier 5: Exposed. Methodology v1.8. Last reviewed 22 October 2026; sources checked 13 November 2026. https://hardyindex.com/chains/chiliz

BibTeX 
@misc{hardyindex_chiliz_2026,
  author       = {{The Hardy Index}},
  title        = {Chiliz Chain: quantum readiness assessment},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://hardyindex.com/chains/chiliz}},
  note         = {Hardy Score 8.5 of 100, Tier 5: Exposed. Methodology v1.8},
  urldate      = {2026-11-13}
}

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This is a security-readiness assessment, not investment advice.