History of crypto agility. It started 10y ago. With all the recent AI and quantum computing fears, everyone suddenly seems to be talking about cryptographic agility. If you ever want to explore the history of cryptographic agility in decentralized ledgers and blockchains, arrange an interview with my team. We have some fascinating stories to share. Back in 2016–2017, my team pioneered cryptographic agility as a fundamental design principle for blockchains, starting with R3 Corda. We supported ECDSA (both secp256k1 and secp256r1), EdDSA, RSA, and SPHINCS, marking the first-ever support for a stateless post-quantum signature scheme in the history of blockchains and decentralized ledgers. This wasn’t just about supporting different algorithms. We were already preparing blockchain infrastructure for a post-quantum future. And there’s a great story behind why some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions were asking us for these capabilities a decade ago. When I moved from London (R3 Corda) to Silicon Valley (Facebook’s Libra), I brought the same philosophy with me. I took cryptographic agility further, including the important architectural distinction between account addresses and authentication keys. This separation, which makes key rotation and cryptographic upgrades much easier, subsequently became a design pattern adopted by several other blockchains. There’s also an interesting story behind why we considered it essential. We carried these principles forward into Sui, which was designed with cryptographic agility from day one. That foundation enabled us to introduce native social authentication through zkLogin, support multiple signature schemes, accommodate key aliases and post-quantum cryptography, and offer native multisig without additional gas overhead. Sui’s modular design from scratch allows magical things to happen. Today, the broader blockchain community is finally recognizing how critical cryptographic agility will be in the age of AI and quantum. And while I’m genuinely happy to see this happening, I can’t help but smile. Imagine watching an architectural principle you led almost 10 years ago suddenly become one of the industry’s hottest topics. Sometimes the most important innovations aren’t the ones that make headlines when they’re introduced. They’re the ones that quietly prepare the infrastructure for a future nobody else is thinking about yet. Hire good cryptographers, the top of the world if you can, and you will be 10y ahead waving 👋 to the future. Raised by Satoshi 😉

For a decade, R3 has worked with banks, regulators and market infrastructure to bring real assets onto ledgers. Tokenizing them was step one. Knowing which ones are worth holding onchain is the next. @Cordaxyz sets out five tests for a tokenized blue chip.

This week, @Mcdtv will be taking over Seoul. Catch him onstage at: → CONNECT by @Cointelegraph on Tuesday, Sep 29, 2:30 PM KST for "The New Financial Establishment: Who Owns the Rails When TradFi and Crypto Merge?" → @kbwofficial on Thursday, Oct 1, 2:20 PM KST for "Deja Vu: It's 'Blockchain Not Bitcoin' Season Again"