The Ethereum Foundation expects to complete quantum-safe upgrades by 2029.

ChainCatcher reports that the Ethereum Foundation published a new roadmap on Tuesday, outlining how the development team will prepare for the threat from quantum computing.

The Foundation’s Quantum Team expects that a series of initial network upgrades can be completed before 2029, mainly involving four key hard forks. The Foundation says that quantum computing will ultimately break the public-key cryptography that protects ownership, authentication, and consensus across all digital systems, but it does not expect this threat to arrive immediately. Researchers from the Foundation’s Quantum Team estimate that quantum computing with cryptography-related capabilities will take another 8 to 12 years to emerge.

Among the four hard forks, the “I” fork will provide quantum-secure public keys for network validators, and the “J” fork will reduce Gas fees for validating quantum-secure signatures. These two upgrades have been factored into the consideration for the Hegota fork that is expected to take place later this year. The “L” fork will compress network state representation into zero-knowledge proofs, and the “M” fork will protect Layer 2 networks from quantum threats.

Researchers say that Layer 1 protocol upgrades can be completed before 2029, while a full execution-layer migration will require several additional years after that. The Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated quantum team in January this year, and the developer testnet began testing some quantum features in March.