GateChain

Is GateChain quantum-safe?

Where we are making a judgement call Three judgement calls carry this profile, and one matter of control belongs beside them. The first judgement is scope. GateChain is rated on the precedent of WEMIX and Hedera, whose block producers are permissioned, because it runs its own consensus on a public mainnet that anyone can transact on, and its documentation sets no minimum stake for a consensus account. Read through GateChain's public API on 23 October 2026, 98 consensus accounts were online, and 20 of them, each with a moniker of the form GtNode followed by a number, held 88 per cent of online consensus power; eight of those held more than a third. The operators of those accounts are not named in the data, but a set that concentrated could decide what the chain finalises. A stricter reading would leave GateChain out of the index rather than score it differently. The second is the signature evidence. GateChain's node source is not public, so the account schemes are read from the chain: an Ed25519 key on the one native account read through its API, the vault account of a consensus account, and secp256k1 signatures on EVM transactions from its RPC. Its wallet documentation says the account type uses ECDSA on secp256k1, which the chain's records contradict for native accounts. Either reading leaves the signature score at 0, because both schemes are broken by Shor's algorithm. The third is migration. Vault accounts, whose security address can revoke a delayed transaction, are not credited as key rotation, because the security address is another classical key and the account's own key never changes; a reader who credits nothing short of a mechanism would score migration 1 and take the Hardy Score from 8.5 to 7.0, and a reader who counted vault accounts as a recovery mechanism would score 3 and raise it to 10.0. The matter of control: GateChain's governance documentation says critical governance operations require a multi-signature wallet and that a Revocable Transaction Model allows abnormal proposals or malicious operations to be reversed within a certain timeframe. We found no published list of who holds those keys. Gate Layer, the layer 2 built on GateChain, is not rated here.

At a glance

Cryptography in use

• Account signatures Ed25519 Mainnet, default The one native account read, the vault account of consensus account GtNode-37, carries a gatechain/PubKeyEd25519 key; GateChain's wallet documentation says accounts use secp256k1. No ordinary native account with transactions was found to sample. Read on-chain
• Account signatures ECDSA on secp256k1 Mainnet, default EVM accounts with 0x addresses on chain ID 86. A sample mainnet transaction read through the EVM RPC on 23 October 2026, 0xe00399cda559a623d644ff2d1fe6e1fe0ac3f830d89ede467a064a6739fe8c1f, carried a standard Ethereum v, r, s signature with a recovered sender. Specification or proposal
• Randomness ECVRF Mainnet, mandatory VRF selection of each round's committee. GateChain's published crypto library implements an Ed25519-based VRF through libsodium; the node's own source is not public, so the library's use in the node is not confirmed. Specification or proposal
• Validator consensus Not confirmed Unknown The API returns each consensus account's key as a gatechain/PubKeyEd25519 key, the same key as its account; the documentation does not say which key signs committee votes, and the node source is not public. Specification or proposal

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

Score breakdown

How it compares

Roadmap

1. 29 June 2020 shipped

   The GateChain mainnet launches, built around normal and vault accounts with revocable delayed transactions. Native accounts sign with Ed25519. source

2. 13 September 2025 shipped

   GateChain announces the v1.1.9 and v1.2.0 consensus upgrade, bringing the Cancun EVM and EIP-4844 blob transactions to provide data availability for Gate Layer. Signatures are unchanged. source

3. 21 January 2026 planned

   GateChain and Gate announce that the 300 million GT mapped between an Ethereum ERC-20 and the GateChain mainnet will move from exchange-mediated transfers to an on-chain lock-and-release bridge within two weeks. Completion was not confirmed from a primary source. Signatures are unchanged. source

4. No date published proposed

   No post-quantum proposal, research programme, implementation or testnet for GateChain's account or consensus signatures was found at the time of writing. source

If holders never migrate

No stated policy

Nothing in GateChain's documentation or status updates addresses accounts that never move to post-quantum keys, because no post-quantum migration has been proposed.

As of 23 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.

GateChain has two address models and both hide the key until it is used. Native addresses, with prefixes gt1, vault1 and gt1m, are described in GateChain's documentation as an encoding of a hash of the public key, and the 40-byte payloads of addresses read from the chain do not contain the Ed25519 keys the API returns for them. EVM accounts follow Ethereum, where an address is a hash of the key. Either way the opening signature publishes the key, and the API returns the public key of accounts that have signed or registered one, so almost all economically active GT sits behind a key that can be collected today against a future quantum computer. An EVM key that has signed on any other EVM chain is equally visible here. Consensus accounts publish their keys by registering them. GateChain started from its own genesis in 2020 and is not a fork of another chain's history, so the exposure inheritance rule does not apply. GT also exists as a 300 million unit ERC-20 on Ethereum, mapped to GT on GateChain, and as bridged GT on Gate Layer; those copies are protected by their host chains' signatures, and their exposure belongs there. No measurement of exposed supply has been published.

Questions

Sources

1. Gate Chain Account Types Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
2. Wallet Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
3. Consensus Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
4. Chain Architecture Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
5. Governance Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
6. Chain Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
7. Status Updates Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
8. HTTP API reference Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
9. Public Endpoints Gate Chain documentation · primary · checked 23 October 2026
10. GateChain node status (public API) GateChain · primary · checked 23 October 2026
11. GateChain consensus accounts (public API) GateChain · primary · checked 23 October 2026
12. GateChain account record with Ed25519 public key (public API) GateChain · primary · checked 23 October 2026
13. GateChain organisation GateChain (GitHub) · primary · checked 23 October 2026
14. GateChain crypto library GateChain (GitHub) · primary · checked 23 October 2026
15. GateChain node binaries GateChain (GitHub) · primary · checked 23 October 2026
16. Announcement on GateChain Fully Launching Cross-Chain Solutions Gate · primary · checked 23 October 2026

@misc{hardyindex_gatechain_2026,
  author       = {{The Hardy Index}},
  title        = {GateChain: quantum readiness assessment},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://hardyindex.com/chains/gatechain}},
  note         = {Hardy Score 8.5 of 100, Tier 5: Exposed. Methodology v1.8},
  urldate      = {2026-11-13}
}