Brink is proud to announce support for conduition, a cryptographic engineer with expertise in post-quantum cryptographic research and implementation, working on the foundations that a quantum-resistant Bitcoin might need. This is Brink’s first grant for post-quantum, part of our focus on potential threats that could affect Bitcoin’s long-term security.
His work will focus on three areas: driving the SHRINCS protocol toward a draft BIP, exploring commit/reveal protocols, and advancing research and education around isogeny-based cryptography in Bitcoin.
About conduition
Conduition writes of his experience and goals:
I’m deeply honored to receive Brink’s first-ever grant to focus on post-quantum research.
This is a field I have pursued in my free time since 2024 when I published a survey of hash-based signature schemes. In 2025, after months of prototyping and benchmarking I built SLHVK: the world’s fastest CPU implementation of SLH-DSA (SPHINCS). More recently, I proposed hypertree pruning - a trick that allows today’s low-power hardware wallets to generate SLH-DSA keypairs over 500x faster.
This generous grant from Brink will help me follow through with the arc of my previous research, as I work alongside the Blockstream team and other independent brilliant individuals to design, draft, and (hopefully) implement the first truly well-researched hash-based signature upgrade proposal for Bitcoin, built on the foundations of BIP-360 and the SHRINCS scheme.
I also hope to use this funding to formalize commit/reveal rescue protocols, which may someday be needed to authenticate inactive UTXOs in the presence of a quantum computer. Today these are folklore techniques buried in the mailing list archives, in need of careful assessment and security proofs.
Finally, I would like to expand my prior research on isogeny cryptography, which I believe has the promise to act as a suitable long-term replacement for Bitcoin’s classical elliptic curve cryptography. This will take the shape of long-form educational content accessible to Bitcoin developers, deep technical exploration of the trade-off space, experimental benchmarks, and hopefully collaboration with mainstream isogeny researchers.
I’d like to earnestly thank Brink for supporting this important work. Because of this grant, I can tighten my focus on these three key topics and still maintain transparency in my research. I will continue publishing articles about my discoveries and software projects on my blog. All relevant code will be published on my github under The Unlicense without restriction or copyright, as always.
About Brink
Brink is a Bitcoin research and development centre, founded in 2020 to support independent open source protocol developers and mentor new contributors. If you or your organization is interested in supporting open source Bitcoin development, feel free to email us, donate@brink.dev.
Developers interested in the grant program can apply now.
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