This is a short but very important update for the project.

In mid-2016 the idea for a fully post-quantum secure ledger was conceived and one of the really tough decisions was which signature scheme to use.

Eventually XMSS was chosen for it’s cryptographic properties — but this was not an easy choice given it is stateful and requires significant computation prior to first use.

A small number of other projects utilise variants of one-time hash-based signatures but QRL is the only crypto asset or blockchain which uses XMSS to protect the entire ledger.

Being unique in that respect it is exciting to see NIST have draft approved hash-based signature families XMSS and LMS for usage. In practice this means that currently QRL is the only crypto asset using (soon to be) NIST-approved post-quantum cryptography.