Native NIST Post-Quantum Signature Verification Goes Live on Aere Network, a Public EVM Layer-1 First

Native post-quantum verification is live on mainnet and open to inspection: a public research record, an independent second client that reproduces the chain byte for byte, and endpoints anyone can check.

MONACO, July 18, 2026: Aere Network, a public EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain (Chain ID 2800), has brought native, protocol-level verification of NIST-standardized post-quantum signatures live on its mainnet, a capability that, to the project's knowledge, no other public EVM Layer-1 offers. The verifiers went live on July 12, 2026, at block 9,189,161. Today the network publishes the complete research record behind them, along with an independently implemented second client that reproduces the chain byte for byte at every height checked, and public endpoints any wallet can verify for itself.

What Aere shipped

Aere moved the NIST post-quantum verifiers into the engine of the chain itself. Five native precompiled contracts, covering Falcon-512, Falcon-1024, ML-DSA-44 (FIPS 204), SLH-DSA-128s (FIPS 205), and the SHAKE256 hash (FIPS 202), run at protocol cost. All five pass the official NIST Known-Answer Tests, and an end-to-end Falcon verification is recorded on mainnet for anyone to inspect. The practical result: an account or smart contract on Aere can require a quantum-resistant signature before it moves value, natively rather than through a bolt-on.

The surrounding stack is live too. Post-quantum threshold custody puts accounts under a committee of quantum-resistant signers, with no single key and no administrator. A governed crypto-agility registry lets the network rotate to newer schemes as standards evolve. Passkey wallets sit alongside these post-quantum mechanisms, replacing seed phrases with the device unlock people already use; passkeys run on today's standard cryptography and fall under the same agility registry.

Why it matters now

Every major blockchain, from Bitcoin to Ethereum, secures accounts and transactions with elliptic-curve signatures, and a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm breaks that mathematics outright. Because chains are public and permanent, the threat is present-tense: for encryption, agencies call the threat "harvest now, decrypt later," and for signatures the analogue is starker, because public keys recorded today become forgeable the day the mathematics falls. The exposure of long-lived keys, from treasuries to institutional holdings to high-frequency AI agents, has already begun. NIST finalized the post-quantum signature standards in 2024, and migrating live blockchains to them is the industry's unsolved homework. That is the homework Aere shipped on July 12 and is documenting in full today.

Built to be checked, not believed

Aere's position is that a settlement network should be verifiable rather than trusted, and it holds itself to that standard:

• The research is public. The full paper on the post-quantum fork, the Aere Improvement Proposals, and the verification record (49 machine-checked consensus properties SMT-proved over the protocol model, plus 15 symbolic-execution proofs over the core contracts) are published under a public-domain license at git.aere.network/aere-network.
• A second, independent client agrees with the chain. An independently implemented client, built on a different codebase in a different programming language, connects to the live network and has reproduced Aere's blocks and world state byte for byte at every height checked so far. A live run has been verified through block 182,777, and a permanent, non-validating follower node is now replaying the full chain history from genesis.
• The data is verifiable. An earlier fee-display shim was retired in July 2026; the public endpoints now serve the chain's real fee market, and every served block header reconstructs its own block hash, so wallets, auditors, and light clients can verify rather than trust. The network is listed in the canonical public chain registry used by major wallets, with two public RPC endpoints in geographically separate data centers.
• The post-quantum claim is checkable in two commands. Ask the network what is active: eth_config against https://rpc.aere.network returns the fork's activationTime of 1783820272 and names the five live precompiles at 0x0AE1 through 0x0AE5. Block 9,189,161 is the first block whose timestamp is at or after that activation time, which anyone can derive by binary search over block timestamps. That block holds no transactions, because a fork activation is a configuration change rather than a transaction, so its significance is its timestamp and not its contents. To confirm the precompiles are executing right now, measure gas rather than reading return values: a live precompile consumes gas and an address with nothing at it consumes none, while both can return empty data. Calibrated against the IDENTITY precompile, whose cost the EVM specification fixes exactly, Falcon-512 measures 40,000 gas and Falcon-1024 measures 75,000, matching the constants published in the client source. The full method, with commands and output, is at aere.network/quantum.html.
• The limits are stated. The validator set is seven Foundation-operated nodes today, all running the network's Besu-derived client and tolerating two faulty nodes (quorum five of seven); the independent second client runs as a non-validating follower, and the decentralization path is published in the project's roadmap and whitepaper. Mainnet consensus signing remains classical ECDSA; the post-quantum capability is at the account and application layers. That is deliberate sequencing: account keys are long-lived and permanently exposed on-chain, so they carry the harvest-now risk first, while validator keys can be rotated, and their migration is the audit-gated hybrid-consensus work described below. The live system has not yet completed a third-party audit; the published proofs and conformance tests are the project's own work, offered for anyone to re-run.

Fast enough to feel instant, economics sealed by code

Aere produces a block every half second with deterministic finality: once a transaction is in a block, it is final, with no confirmation counts and no reorganizations, and a typical transfer costs a fraction of a cent. The native token, AERE, has a fixed supply of 2.8 billion set at genesis, with no new minting and no insider unlock schedule, and the genesis allocation is visible on-chain for anyone to inspect. A Foundation-set share of validator rewards, currently 37.5 percent and hard-capped at half by code, is routed to a sealed burn vault with no withdrawal path.

The block parameters allow a design ceiling on the order of 273,000 transactions per second; that ceiling is implied by the parameters, not a measured figure, and today's realized throughput is far below it. Closing that gap is the job of the published scaling roadmap, which includes a parallel-execution engine already built in the client fork but not yet serving mainnet. The network is built for the machine economy as well: Aere402, an x402-compatible payment rail, lets AI agents pay per request with sub-second settlement, and an on-chain agent identity registry gives autonomous software a verifiable footing.

The road ahead

On isolated test networks, work is underway toward hybrid post-quantum consensus: blocks signed by validators with both classical and Falcon signatures at once, so the chain itself, not just its accounts, stands on quantum-resistant mathematics. The designs are machine-checked and public, and the upgrade ships only after an external audit. The project's thesis is one sentence long: final as math, safe when the math changes.

About Aere Network

Aere Network is a public, EVM-compatible Layer-1 settlement network (Chain ID 2800) built to outlast today's cryptography: half-second deterministic finality, typical fees below a cent, a fixed token supply, and native NIST post-quantum signature verification live at the account layer on mainnet, with hybrid post-quantum consensus under development and gated on an external audit. Everything the network claims is designed to be checked by anyone, from the block explorer to the published research record.

• Website aere.network
• Explorer explorer.aere.network
• Research git.aere.network/aere-network (public domain)
• Whitepaper aere.network/whitepaper
• Press Center Press and Media Center

Media contact: Aere Network Foundation, [email protected]. For the full media kit, logos, and past releases, visit the Press and Media Center.

ENDS