# Solana’s Quantumglow Proposal Targets Post-Quantum Validator Security By Simon Yoon Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/39166 Published: 2026-10-23T17:40:08.000Z Updated: 2026-10-23T17:40:08.000Z Section: Technology > The research dates to July, before Alpenglow’s mainnet activation. Quantumglow has no announced implementation schedule. Solana Developers outlined Quantumglow on Thursday as a research proposal to adapt Alpenglow’s validator consensus for post-quantum security, with no implementation date announced. The research behind the proposal dates to July, before Alpenglow’s mainnet activation on Wednesday, Oct. 21. Solana Developers described Quantumglow as “a proposed adaptation of Alpenglow that aims to protect consensus while preserving fast finality.” The design addresses validator signatures, quorum evidence and block authentication, and remains a proposal rather than a deployed upgrade. Ax, short for Alpenglow XMSS, uses hash-based signatures. Validators would exchange and cache one-time public-key material before using it. The proposed changes cover consensus operations; they do not extend post-quantum protection to Solana accounts or wallets. A companion Distributed Quorum Signatures design would let validators record certificates as local events supported by vote and approval messages. Each message would remain constant in size as the node count changes, while total communication would grow quadratically with node count. Those are properties of the design, not measurements from Solana mainnet. In practical terms, the message size would stay stable even as overall communication grew with the number of nodes. For block authentication, the proposal uses a signed commitment over the block payload and authenticated communication channels. That design avoids attaching a large signature to each block fragment. It addresses how block data is authenticated alongside how validators reach consensus, but does not change wallet signatures. Epoch 1064 opened at approximately 9:36 a.m. ET (13:36 UTC) on Oct. 21, when Alpenglow’s feature gate became active. Alpenglow took over at slot 459,653,000 after TowerBFT had remained in use for 5,000 slots, or roughly 18 minutes. Alpenglow targets finality of about 150 milliseconds. Solana’s earlier [quantum migration plan]() covered signature options and a possible staged migration for wallets. Quantumglow addresses validator consensus and block authentication. No implementation schedule has been announced. ## Links in this article - [quantum migration plan](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/28112)