How Quants works

Quants is 1,000 pixel critters on Solana, minted as Metaplex Core NFTs and gated by $QUANTS. Each one is a 32 by 32 pixel drawing rendered by code from stacked trait layers, and no two share the same trait combination.

The twist: every Quant's provenance is signed with ML-DSA-65, the post-quantum signature NIST standardized as FIPS 204 on August 13, 2024. We call it the first quantum-proof NFT collection on Solana. The precise version: its provenance signatures are post-quantum, its ownership is regular Solana.

Wallets prove ownership with elliptic-curve signatures. Solana uses ed25519, Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1. Their security rests on one assumption: you can't turn a public key back into its private key. Shor's algorithm, running on a large enough error-corrected quantum computer, does exactly that. Grover's algorithm is the smaller worry: it only square-roots brute force, so SHA-256 and AES-256 are considered fine.

• Mar 2026Google Quantum AI estimates 256-bit elliptic-curve keys could fall to under 1,200 logical qubits, or under 500,000 physical superconducting qubits, in minutes.
• May 2025Craig Gidney (Google) cuts the RSA-2048 estimate to under a million noisy qubits, in under a week, down from 20 million in 2019.
• Apr 2026The largest elliptic-curve key publicly broken on quantum hardware: 15 bits. Real keys are 256.
• 2035NIST plans to disallow ECDSA, EdDSA and RSA signatures, with deprecation starting after 2030.

Solana is working on it. Blueshift shipped the Solana Winternitz Vault in January 2025, a hash-based, quantum-resistant vault that runs on mainnet today. Anza and Firedancer picked Falcon as their leading post-quantum signature candidate in 2026, though nothing is activated on mainnet yet. Quants is a much smaller thing: a collection whose signed provenance already uses the new math.

We generated one ML-DSA-65 keypair for the collection. For every Quant we hash the final PNG (sha256), build a message from its id, trait hash and image hash, and sign it:

quants:v1:<id>:<comboHash>:<imageSha256>

The public key is published at /pq/key.json and each signature at /pq/sig/<id>.json. The same fields sit in every token's metadata under properties.pq.

{
  "id": 412,
  "scheme": "ML-DSA-65",
  "keyId": "<first 16 hex of sha256(publicKey)>",
  "comboHash": "<sha256 of the trait combo>",
  "imageSha256": "<sha256 of the PNG bytes>",
  "message": "quants:v1:412:<comboHash>:<imageSha256>",
  "signature": "<3,309 bytes, base64>"
}

• ML-DSA-65 is NIST security category 3. Public key 1,952 bytes, signature 3,309 bytes.
• It's lattice-based. There's no known quantum algorithm that breaks it the way Shor breaks elliptic curves.
• Signing and verifying use @noble/post-quantum, an open-source TypeScript implementation.
• The secret key never touches the site. Only the public key and signatures are published.

Two phases. First, while the first 250 last, a keeper mints one Quant directly to every new wallet holding at least 100,000 $QUANTS. No site visit, no signature. After that, minting moves to the site and needs 1,000,000 $QUANTS.

1. Connect your wallet (Phantom, Solflare, Backpack, or email).
2. Sign a one-time message to prove you control it. No transaction, no gas.
3. When you mint, we add up your $QUANTS across all your token accounts and check it on-chain against the gate, right then.

Your $QUANTS never leaves your wallet.

$QUANTS is a pump.fun token on Solana. To pass the gate:

1. Open a Solana wallet and fund it with SOL.
2. Buy $QUANTS on pump.fun or any Solana aggregator, using the mint address below.
3. Make sure the wallet shows at least 1,000,000 $QUANTS, then go to the mint page.

1. Open the mint page and connect.
2. Verify wallet ownership with one signature.
3. When the gate badge turns green, press Mint my Quant.
4. Your Quant is minted and revealed. It shows in your wallet and on My Quants once indexed.

Every Quant is built from eight layers: Ground, State, Body, Skin, Eyes, Mouth, Headwear and Accessory. Each trait has a weight and a rarity score. A Quant's tier comes from the sum:

Royalties are set at the collection level and apply to every piece.