Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA)

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Hash-based signatures are often pitched as the safe bet against quantum computers and AI. Ledger's CTO, Charles Guillemet, isn't convinced they deserve that status.

The disagreement goes right to the heart of this debate: the experts can't agree on which kind of cryptography is safest. At Devcon this month, Ethereum Foundation researchers called hashes "the most conservative option" against quantum and AI attackers, and @VitalikButerin has advised favoring hash-based schemes wherever possible.

Guillemet underscores that full SHA-256 is still secure, but AI is helping researchers eat into its safety margin. So hash-based signatures, as the Ledger CTO puts it, "are not fundamentally more immune to AI-based attacks than other signature schemes."

Coinbase's head of cryptography, @LindellYehuda, has made a similar point from the history books: hash functions have been broken more often than elliptic curves.

These are informed judgments. Nobody knows which kind of cryptography will still be standing in ten years.

That's the strongest argument against a blockchain making one choice for all its users. A chain that writes one signature scheme into its rules is betting on the winner, and if the bet goes wrong, the fix is another fork.

On CKB, nobody has to place that bet for everyone. A hash-based scheme, SPHINCS+, is live on mainnet today. If another scheme becomes the better choice, it can be added the same way, as software, and holders can move when they choose.

Mythos, the AI model Anthropic won't release because it's too good at finding security holes, has given Bitcoin Core a clean bill of health. Great news. But Bitcoin's harder test is beyond the reach of any code review.

Full credit to @muneeb and everyone who organized the review. Bitcoin's signatures rest on mathematics that a large enough quantum computer could break, a weakness known since before Bitcoin existed. Fixing that takes more than a code patch: switching signature schemes means changing the network's rules. That needs a fork.

Bitcoin's quantum problem is also a coordination problem. Muneeb has already named it: it's hard to get organized in a decentralized system. Getting a code review done took a few determined people. Getting a fork adopted takes agreement across the network.

On CKB, adding a post-quantum option skipped that step. Signature schemes were never written into the network's rules. Developers built a lock using SPHINCS+, a post-quantum signature scheme, and deployed it on mainnet like any other software.

Holders who want it can move to it today. The rest of the network didn't have to agree, or even notice.

"Upgrading blockchains is hard," says @EliBenSasson. Ethereum is finding out how hard.

At Devcon last week, its researchers announced they had brought their post-quantum deadline forward to December 2028. Getting there runs through four forks, starting with Glamsterdam, which is stuck at the testnet stage.

The holdup: Glamsterdam's new gas pricing would break eight assumptions that live contracts rely on. There's no new date until developers know which contracts are affected.

Credit to Ethereum for catching it before mainnet. But this is the cost of changing a chain's rules: everything built on the old rules has to be checked, and everyone waits. A deadline that runs through forks inherits every one of their surprises.

Ethereum, at least, has a plan and a date. Bitcoin hasn't agreed on a plan yet, never mind a date. That's why Eli calls Bitcoiners "delulu" for thinking they'll simply migrate when the time comes.

CKB was designed from first principles to keep signature schemes out of its protocol rules, and launched that way in 2019.

A new scheme is new software, added alongside the rest. Existing locks keep working, and holders move when they're ready. That's how an audited SPHINCS+ lock went live on mainnet, without waiting for a fork.

Learning to build on CKB takes time. The tooling is different enough from most ecosystems that new developers often hit walls that take days to get past.

The CKB AI Scholarship is a direct response to that.

CKBuilders get access to the Share-AI platform for shared AI model access at Level 1, and personal Claude accounts for more intensive development work at Level 2, with access tied to specific output and reporting requirements.

Alongside this, a CKB-specific MCP server is in development, trained on CKB documentation and tooling, with the aim of giving the models enough context to be genuinely useful on CKB-specific problems.

The hypothesis is straightforward: better AI tools, trained on the right material, should substantially reduce the time from onboarding to shipping.

More than 40 developers are already using the platform.

Full Q3 report 👉 talk.nervos.org/t/nervos-commu…