ZKNox reduces the verification cost of Falcon post-quantum signatures by 12x, and hardware wallets are expected to be able to join the post-quantum ecosystem at near-retail prices

Gate News message: On April 2, Nicolas Bacca (btchip), founder of the research organization ZKNox supported by the Ethereum Foundation, and the former co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ledger, presented technical progress on deeply integrating hardware wallets with Ethereum at EthCC[9]. He pointed out that, because the EVM natively does not support certain efficient cryptographic signature schemes and complex verification logic, hardware wallets have long struggled to achieve perfect compatibility with the advanced features brought by account abstraction. ZKNox reduced the on-chain verification cost for its anti-quantum Falcon signing scheme from 24 million Gas to 2 million Gas—an efficiency improvement of about 12x—so that the transaction costs for generating post-quantum secure-signed transactions via a hardware wallet are close to those of ordinary transactions. At the same time, ZKNox is developing a standardized SDK to support account abstraction features such as seamless social recovery, multi-signatures, and complex permission management on hardware wallets, and is also exploring generating zero-knowledge proofs on the hardware device to validate the legitimacy of signatures on-chain without exposing sensitive information. Nicolas said ZKNox’s goal is to establish open-source hardware security standards, so that hardware wallets can become a universal anti-quantum digital identity signing device across L2s and application scenarios.