Hardy Index Quantum readiness benchmark

What changed · What changed

Correction: four claims comparing one chain to the whole index were wrong

An audit found four sentences that ranked one chain against the rest of the index and had quietly stopped being true.

The Hardy Index · Published 2 September 2026 · Every dated event below carries a primary source.

The short answer

Four sentences comparing one chain to the rest of the index had stopped being true. QRL, Mochimo, Nervos CKB and Solana all had that comparative prose corrected. No score and no tier changed for any of them. The fix is to wording, plus a build check that now re-verifies claims like these.

What was wrong, chain by chain

An audit of every page on the platform looked for statements that are both scoped to this index and comparative: sentences of the form "the only chain here that" or "more than any other chain here". Four were false. Two of them were on the two highest-ranked rows we publish, and they contradicted each other in public.

  • QRL was described as the only chain in the index where a post-quantum signature is mandatory for every account on mainnet, and as the only one with no quantum-vulnerable option available at all. Mochimo is the same case. Both launched in June 2018, both score the maximum on the signature dimension, and Mochimo's own row notes that its node source carries no elliptic-curve signature code. QRL's summary now describes QRL on its own terms, and the question names both chains.
  • Mochimo made the mirror-image error. Its migration note said that having no classical legacy "removes the hardest problem every other chain in this index faces". That is not true of QRL or Abelian, which also launched post-quantum. It now refers to every chain that did not.
  • Nervos CKB said that running a finalised NIST standard live on mainnet was something no other chain in the index does. That was true when it was written. It stopped being true on 16 August, when NEAR joined with ML-DSA-65 under FIPS 204. The sentence now names NEAR. Its separate "cleanest migration in the index" line is now hedged against Sui, XRP Ledger and NEAR, which score the same on that dimension.
  • Solana was called both the most generous placement in the index and the most contestable call in it. Bitcoin Cash was placed on the same contract-level reasoning two days earlier, so both sentences are now hedged.

What this does not change

No score moved. Not one dimension, on any of the four chains. Every correction is to prose that ranked chains against each other, not to the evidence underneath a rating. QRL still requires a hash-based signature for every account. Mochimo still ships WOTS+ from genesis. Nervos CKB still has SPHINCS+ live on mainnet through a lock script you have to choose. Solana still signs standard accounts with Ed25519, with Winternitz vaults available at the application level and Falcon selected but not deployed.

So if you hold any of these, nothing about your exposure changed on 18 August. What changed is that we were making superlative claims we could no longer support, and two of them were flatly incompatible.

Where this stands today

As rated by the Hardy Index, current as of 2 October 2026. Ratings change when the evidence does, and every change is recorded in the changelog.

Why all four survived, and what now stops them

Nothing was checking them. A superlative is true on the day it is written and decays silently as the index grows. The Nervos CKB line is the clearest example: it was accurate until a new chain was added, and adding that chain did not touch the sentence.

From 18 August, every sentence in the dataset that is both index-scoped and comparative has to be registered, and the build fails on any that is not. Thirty are registered. Eleven carry a predicate checked against the live data on every build, so QRL and Mochimo being the only two chains at the top of the signature dimension is now arithmetic rather than memory. Seventeen are judgements no predicate can express, so each is pinned to the number of chains in the index when a person last read it: change the size of the index and the build fails until someone re-reads them. Two trip the pattern while explicitly asserting no ranking, and say so.

How we know it worksThe register and its guard were tested by breaking them. An unregistered claim, an edited sentence, a falsified predicate and a change in the number of chains each produce a failed build.

If you hold one of these

Treat "only chain" language, ours or anyone else's, as a claim with an expiry date. The underlying facts are the durable part: what scheme signs your transactions today, whether it is mandatory or opt-in, and whether the post-quantum option is on mainnet or on a roadmap.

For these four, that reading has not changed. The two native chains are covered in more depth in QRL's history and the Nervos CKB write-up, and Mochimo's arrival is in the coverage note. If you want the comparison rather than the individual rows, read which chains are most quantum resistant, which now leans on the checked predicates rather than on a remembered ranking. The full entry is in the changelog.

Where to go next

Sources

Every dated event above carries its own primary source. These are those sources, each checked on the date shown.

  1. Hardy Index methodology Hardy Index · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  2. QRL signature scheme documentation The Quantum Resistant Ledger · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  3. Mochimo node source: WOTS+ implementation (wots.h) Mochimo · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  4. RFC 8391: XMSS, eXtended Merkle Signature Scheme IETF · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  5. Native quantum resistance on Nervos CKB Nervos · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  6. FIPS 204: Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard (ML-DSA) NIST · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  7. FIPS 205: Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Standard (SLH-DSA) NIST · primary · checked 2 September 2026
  8. Solana quantum readiness Solana · primary · checked 2 September 2026

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