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SoK: Stablecoins in the Quantum Era
arxiv.orgpaper

SoK: Stablecoins in the Quantum Era

This arXiv SoK paper systematizes the quantum-era risks facing stablecoins, mapping cryptographic dependencies (issuer, custody, upgrade, oracle, bridge keys) to monetary control surfaces and classifying migration options along who can authorize a change, where it occurs, and whether it is hybrid, post-quantum native, or encapsulated. It introduces an "authority-liability gap" concept — the entity able to migrate a cryptographic component is often not the one that bears losses if migration fails — and connects migration choices to redemption, continuity, and intervention requirements under current stablecoin regulation. The paper also flags open problems in threshold authorization, dormant/wrapped supply, and measuring quantum-vulnerable exposure.

TL;DR An SoK mapping post-quantum migration strategies and the resulting authority-liability gap for stablecoin issuer, custody, bridge, and oracle keys.
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What it is

SoK: Stablecoins in the Quantum Era (Chatzigiannis, Alamati, Chakraborty — Visa Research; Le — Circle Research, arXiv Oct 2026). Its threat model specifically maps quantum capabilities to six stablecoin-level attack classes: issuer-key forgery, wrapped-supply inflation, oracle/governance manipulation, long-range history rewriting, proof failure, and retroactive disclosure.

How it works

The paper builds a three-layer model — control plane (mint/burn, treasury, pause/blacklist, upgrade, oracle admin, bridge attestation), settlement substrate (host-chain accounts, finality signatures, rollup proofs, light clients), and claim/distribution layer (holders, custodians, exchanges, DeFi) — and shows losses concentrate in the bottom layer even when the vulnerable key sits in the top layer. It gives a concrete worked example in its control-surface table: contracts that verify signatures via ecrecover are immutable, so a host-chain hard fork replacing ecrecover would forge permits and gasless transfers into unupgradeable DeFi/custody/payment contracts — the blocking dependency named is the 65-byte signature ABI, which has no upgrade path without a registry for PQ keys (citing Circle's roadmap [18]).

Preconditions / Affected

Applies to fiat-backed issuers (Circle's EVM implementation is named, separating owner/proxy-owner/master-minter/pauser/blacklister roles), crypto-collateralized designs (DAI, LUSD), algorithmic/hybrid designs (Basis Cash, TerraUSD, FRAX), and bridged/wrapped stablecoins using lock-and-mint or burn-and-mint. Severity depends on whether a chain's signature verification is hardcoded into immutable contracts versus upgradeable via governance.

What to do

The paper compares concrete in-flight migration proposals rather than prescribing one: Zcash ZIP-2005 (Orchard note recoverability hooks), Bitcoin BIP-360/BIP-361 (new output types, legacy-signature sunset), Ethereum EIP-8051/EIP-8164 (ML-DSA precompiles, native key delegation), Sui's PQ migration analysis (replacing credential signature and proof system while keeping the account address), Solana's staged Falcon rollout (Anza/Firedancer PQ wallets plus a Winternitz vault overlay), and Circle's phased roadmap (readiness → transition → switch, with an explicit scope split between what the issuer controls and what it must leave to host chains/vendors/contract owners).

Caveats

The paper states its completeness claim is category-level, not bibliographic — it does not claim to cover every implementation or primitive, only the distinct control surfaces and migration authorities. It also explicitly notes that none of the reviewed proposals migrates the entire stablecoin stack on its own, and flags unresolved governance for assets that never migrate (per Coinbase's 2026 Quantum Advisory Council reports).

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