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It's crypto-agility.
One of the most interesting parts of Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap isn’t the specific PQ signature schemes it’s researching.View quoted post on X
It’s crypto-agility.
Today, ordinary Ethereum accounts are tied to ECDSA/secp256k1. Ethereum’s proposed Frame Transactions (EIP-8141) would change that by making authentication programmable at the account level.
In simple terms, Ethereum would stop mandating a single signature scheme for ordinary accounts and instead let accounts define their own verification logic.
With Frame Transactions, a user could migrate from ECDSA to a post-quantum signature scheme, and later from that scheme to another one, without Ethereum needing a hard fork every time the cryptography changes.
This is what crypto-agility is all about, and what we’ve been raving about for some time now. If a PQ scheme is weakened, broken, or simply superseded, you want to be able to replace it without redesigning the protocol.
What Ethereum is trying to introduce at the account layer is conceptually very similar to something CKB already gets from its architecture.
On CKB, ownership isn’t hardcoded to one signature algorithm. Instead, Cells are protected by Lock Scripts: verification programs executed by the RISC-V-based CKB-VM.
A Lock Script can verify secp256k1 or SPHINCS+/SLH-DSA today, or some entirely different signature scheme introduced in the future.
The base layer doesn’t need to be redesigned around each new scheme. It simply executes the verification program.
It’s very cool to see a leading chain like Ethereum converging on the same conclusion CKB arrived at seven years ago:
Blockchains shouldn’t be built around the assumption that today’s cryptography will still be tomorrow’s cryptography.
