Thu Jun 18 2026
The conversation about quantum risk to digital assets has, until now, been almost entirely theoretical — and as of today, that changes. 01 Quantum Inc. (TSXV: ONE; OTCQB: OONEF) and qLABS have announced the commercial availability of qVAULT, a self-custody, smart-contract vault that lets holders move digital assets out of elliptic-curve-only control and into a post-quantum signing environment. After an early-access period in which initial Hyperliquid users migrated $HYPE into the vault, qVAULT is now open to the public. This is not a roadmap promise. It is a live, audited product doing the thing the rest of the industry is still describing in future tense.
Nearly every major public blockchain — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperliquid among them — relies on elliptic-curve signatures such as ECDSA over the secp256k1 curve to secure transactions. That cryptography has held up well against classical computers. It is not designed to hold up against quantum ones.
The mechanism of concern is specific and well understood. Every time a transaction is signed, a public key is exposed on-chain. Those keys are permanent, public, and harvestable. A sufficiently capable quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could, in principle, derive the corresponding private key from an exposed public key — meaning data captured today can be stored and broken later. This is the “harvest now, decrypt later” problem, and it is why the absence of a working quantum attack today offers no real comfort. The exposure is already on the ledger.
qVAULT is a post-quantum, self-custody smart-contract vault. Rather than relying on ECDSA alone, it signs transactions using Falcon (FN-DSA) — the signature scheme the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected for standardization, currently under public review as FIPS-206. Holders connect their wallets, create a Falcon-secured vault, and transfer their assets in, gaining post-quantum protection while retaining full custody at every step. qLABS never holds keys or seed phrases.
Under the hood, qVAULT is built on 01 Quantum’s patent-pending QCW (Quantum Crypto Wrapper) and QDW (Quantum DeFi Wrapper) technologies, which provide the integration layer connecting Falcon signatures to real post-quantum transaction flows. The significance of that integration layer is easy to underestimate: standardised algorithms exist, but getting them to run natively and securely on existing, widely adopted blockchains is the hard part the industry has largely deferred. qVAULT is what it looks like when that work is actually finished.
A claim of quantum-safety is only as good as its verification. qVAULT’s design and threat model are published in a public whitepaper, and its code has undergone an independent security audit by Fairyproof. The qLABS advisory board brings the credibility to match: it includes Dr. Edoardo Persichetti, co-author of HQC — one of the algorithms NIST selected through its post-quantum standardization process — alongside Aaron Moore, former CTO of QuSecure with prior roles at the NSA and DARPA.
That combination of published threat model, third-party audit, and standards-level cryptographic expertise is what separates a working post-quantum product from a quantum-themed one.
The operational mechanics of the Hyperliquid vault environment are integrated with $qONE, the qLABS native token associated with qVAULT, which has traded on Hyperliquid since February 2026. $qONE is designed as the native currency for paying for quantum-safe transactions, and commercial availability of the vault marks a meaningful step in the evolution of that ecosystem. As adoption and transactional volume within the vaults scale, protocol mechanisms are expected to drive increasing demand for the token.
“Post-quantum security has matured,” said Andrew Cheung, CEO of 01 Quantum. “qVAULT provides a way for digital-asset holders to begin exploring Falcon-based signatures within a live, audited smart-contract environment. This allows users to apply post-quantum security as part of their broader risk-management planning for their digital asset holdings.”
Antanas Guoga (Tony G), President of qLABS, framed it in terms of the ecosystem qVAULT now serves: “Hyperliquid has grown significantly as an on-chain trading environment. As the industry evaluates potential long-term cryptographic risks, qVAULT offers a framework for users and institutions to assess post-quantum signing options within that ecosystem.”
The pattern here is the one 01 Quantum has followed throughout: anticipate the threat, build the solution before it is urgent, and ship something real while others are still convening working groups. The migration to quantum-safe infrastructure cannot be done overnight, and it cannot be done in a panic once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists. It has to begin while there is still time to do it carefully — which is to say, now.
For digital-asset holders weighing how to manage long-term cryptographic risk, the question is no longer whether a quantum-safe option exists — it is live, audited, and available today.