XDC Network

Is XDC Network quantum-safe?

Where we are making a judgement call The tier turns on who speaks for XDC. XDC Innovation Labs' roadmap names schemes and dates, and the case for reading it as the core team speaking rests chiefly on its FAQ, which says the migration is "co-led by Ritesh Kakkad (XDC Core)", the XinFin co-founder. On that reading XDC would be Tier 3, with a deployment score of 5 and a Hardy Score of 27.5 instead of 20.0. We did not, because the lab calls itself one contributor within a broader ecosystem, its team page says its profiles are placeholders, the XDC Foundation has published nothing on it, and the XIP-PQ-001 vote its roadmap marks as done has no published text or result. We placed XDC in Tier 4 rather than Tier 5 on the Falcon proof of concept, whose author has contributed to XDPoSChain's main branch since 2021. A reader who gives that unmerged branch no weight would place XDC in Tier 5, with a deployment score of 1 and a Hardy Score of 17.5. The verification score of 2 follows from the same reading of the lab: because it is not treated as XDC's authority, its quantum-safe marketing is not treated as XDC's claim.

At a glance

Cryptography in use

• Account signatures ECDSA on secp256k1 Mainnet, default Source code or release
• Validator consensus ECDSA on secp256k1 Mainnet, mandatory XDPoS 2.0 block headers, votes and timeouts. Source code or release
• Validator consensus FN-DSA Specified, not deployed Proof of concept on an unmerged branch, last committed 9 August 2025. Source code or release
• Account signatures ML-DSA Proposed Proposed by XDC Innovation Labs, not by an XDC governing body, through account abstraction. Statement or write-up

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. June to August 2025 shipped

   A core XDPoSChain contributor implements Falcon signing and verification for XDPoS 2.0 blocks, votes, quorum certificates and timeouts on the poc_falcon branch, with benchmarks. The branch is not merged. source

2. 16 August 2025 shipped

   A three-layer post-quantum migration for consensus, transactions and applications is written up on the XDC developer forum, reporting block signatures growing from 65 to 652 bytes under Falcon and calling the choice of algorithm premature. source

3. March 2026 shipped

   XDC Innovation Labs launches its post-quantum initiative and publishes a four-phase roadmap to 2030. The roadmap lists an XIP-PQ-001 community vote to ratify it and marks that item as done, but we found no published text or result for the vote. source

4. No date from an XDC governing body proposed

   Falcon consensus signatures after a 12-month dual-signing period, then an 18-month notice before ECDSA consensus signatures are retired. The lab dates this to 2029 and 2030 on its roadmap and to 2030 and 2031 in its FAQ; neither date is the chain's. source

If holders never migrate

No stated policy

No XDC governing body has stated a policy for accounts that never move to post-quantum keys. XDC Innovation Labs' FAQ says ECDSA transactions keep working through its Phase 3 and that ECDSA is deprecated once more than 95 per cent of the network upgrades, without saying what happens to the rest.

As of 22 October 2026. source 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.

XDC follows Ethereum's address model, with an xdc prefix in place of 0x. An address is derived from a Keccak-256 hash of the secp256k1 public key, so an account that has never signed keeps its key private, but every signature lets anyone recover the key. Accounts in use, and the masternodes that sign every block, have therefore published their keys, and those balances could be recorded now for a future quantum attack.

Questions

Sources

1. XDPoSChain crypto/crypto.go XinFinOrg (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
2. XDPoS 2.0 engine utils.go XinFinOrg (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
3. XDPoSChain poc_falcon branch XinFinOrg (GitHub) · primary · checked 22 October 2026
4. Securing XDC with Post-Quantum Signatures XDC Developers Forum · secondary · checked 22 October 2026
5. Quantum-Safe Migration Roadmap XDC Innovation Labs · secondary · checked 22 October 2026
6. Post-Quantum FAQ XDC Innovation Labs · secondary · checked 22 October 2026
7. XDC Innovation Labs XDC Innovation Labs · secondary · checked 22 October 2026
8. About XDC Innovation Labs XDC Innovation Labs · secondary · checked 22 October 2026
9. Team XDC Innovation Labs · secondary · checked 22 October 2026
10. Post-Quantum Cryptography project NIST · primary · checked 22 October 2026

@misc{hardyindex_xdc_network_2026,
  author       = {{The Hardy Index}},
  title        = {XDC Network: quantum readiness assessment},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://hardyindex.com/chains/xdc-network}},
  note         = {Hardy Score 20.0 of 100, Tier 4: Debating. Methodology v1.8},
  urldate      = {2026-11-13}
}