The EternaX Labs team presented this May 5 a new post-quantum authentication scheme called SILMARILS (Compact Post-Quantum Authentication System for Cryptoasset Chain Systems) that produces digital signatures of only 160 bytes.
The development responds to one of the main problems of post-quantum migration: the size of its signatures compared to the systems currently used.
The signatures standardized by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the most studied and analyzed today, They occupy between 690 bytes and more than 7,000 bytes each. The larger the signature size, the larger the size of the transactions and increases the costs of bandwidth, storage and validation in cryptoasset networks.
According to Dariia Porechna, cryptographer and co-founder of EternaX Labs, SILMARILS avoids that “size tax” because works as a signature with designated verifiera specific network participant who confirms the authenticity of a transaction before consensus is reached.
According to Porechna, after verifying the transaction, validators publish a 32-byte receipt on-chain that allows any third party to independently audit it once consensus is reached. The result is that the authentication fingerprint per transaction is 160 bytes, 76% to 98% smaller than NIST-standardized post-quantum signaturesdepending on the scheme with which it is compared.
Are these signatures applicable in Bitcoin?
In Bitcoin, any node on the network can independently verify that a transaction is valid using only the public data of the chainwithout depending on any specific participant or designated verifier as proposed by the SILMARILS scheme.
The signatures ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), which today occupy between 70 and 72 bytes in Bitcoinwere designed precisely so that Anyone can check its validity with the issuer’s public key.
SILMARILS operates differently. Authenticity verification falls to designated validators who act before consensus; only then do they publish the 32-byte receipt. An external node cannot revalidate the transaction on its own with the on-chain data and must trust that validators did their job correctly.
For Bitcoin, whose design principle is to eliminate exactly that dependency, the incompatibility is structural, not parameter-based. Porechna herself acknowledges in the statement that SILMARILS is not a direct replacement for standard public signatures.
Thus, incorporating it into Bitcoin would require redesigning the network verification model through a hard fork (a modification of the protocol) and reach a broad consensus among developers.