Pera Wallet ships Quantum Accounts as Falcon-signed transactions top 1.19M

2026-09-06

wallet · post-quantum · security · nft · discovery · web · algorand

Pera Wallet ships Quantum Accounts as Falcon-signed transactions top 1.19M

Every transaction a wallet signs is broadcast onto a public ledger and archived forever — and so, cryptographically speaking, is the signature itself, the part a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might someday forge. Security researchers call the exposure 'harvest now, decrypt later': data recorded today could be cracked years from now, once machines running Shor's algorithm exist. That long-horizon threat is why Pera Wallet, Algorand's default self-custodial app, now offers what it calls Quantum Accounts: accounts signed with Falcon-1024, a post-quantum signature scheme standardized by NIST at its highest security level.

The feature, announced in a Pera blog post on August 26 and documented in its support center five days later, rides on the biggest protocol change Algorand has made since staking rewards arrived in January 2025. Version 5.0.0 of the network cleared the 90% node-support threshold on August 15 and activated on mainnet around August 22, making Falcon-1024 accounts a native account type rather than something bolted on through custom logic. It is the first deliverable of the Algorand Foundation's June post-quantum roadmap, which had explicitly named Pera as the wallet where account creation would appear. The chain is not new to the scheme — its State Proofs have anchored transaction history with Falcon signatures since 2022, and the first Falcon-authorized transaction on mainnet was sent in 2025 — but this is the first time an ordinary user can hold a quantum-resilient key in the default wallet.

A second account type, not an upgrade

A Quantum Account is still a regular Algorand account; only the math underneath the key changes. Nearly every wallet today signs with Ed25519, an elliptic-curve scheme unbreakable by classical computers but theoretically vulnerable to a quantum one. Falcon replaces that foundation with lattice-based math, and on Algorand the two schemes are kept deliberately separate: the protocol derives quantum addresses so that no classical private key is a valid match for them. That separation shows up in a detail Pera warns about in its docs — generating a Quantum Account and a Legacy account from the same 25-word recovery phrase produces two different accounts with two different addresses. Pera offers two paths in, and the choice has real consequences:

Concept	Real-World Implication
Create a new Quantum Account	Tap 'Add Quantum Account' in the accounts list. The account carries its own 25-word recovery phrase, which must be backed up and stored separately; Pera, remaining non-custodial, cannot restore access if that phrase is lost
Rekey an existing account	Rekeying lets an account delegate its signing authority to a different key: the address, balance, holdings, history and dApp connections all stay exactly as they are, and only the key that must authorize future transactions changes underneath

Rekeying is the migration path for people who already live on Algorand and do not want to change the address they share and connect everywhere. Pera's support article describes selecting 'Rekey to Standard Account' and choosing a Quantum Account, then confirming the transaction; from then on the same address signs with Falcon. Creation, meanwhile, is documented on Pera Mobile — the flow described is mobile-only, and Pera's docs do not currently describe quantum account creation in its companion browser wallet, Pera Web.

There is one compatibility caveat users will meet immediately. Not every dApp has upgraded to understand post-quantum transactions, so the first time a Quantum Account connects through WalletConnect, Pera displays a warning that transactions on un-upgraded dApps could fail or carry different fees than usual, and offers the choice to continue or switch to a standard account. Pera frames this as expected at this stage: 'This is expected and normal this early. Support across the ecosystem will grow over time.'

What Falcon signing actually costs

The reason v5.0.0 could make Falcon accounts native is that it simultaneously changed how Algorand prices transactions, from a flat rate to a usage-based model. The Foundation's own explanation is direct: quantum-resilient signatures are cheaper to verify than a standard signature, but they take up significantly more space in a block, 'and that added block space is what the extra fee accounts for.' Fees now scale with what a transaction actually contains, so a Falcon-signed transaction carries a higher fee than an equivalent Ed25519 one of the same age, while ordinary payments stay at the network's negligible baseline. The practical consequence for a user who moves permanently to a Quantum Account is a small but lasting per-transaction premium; Pera does not publish an exact schedule for how much more a Falcon signature costs, and the precise multiplier was not stated in the documentation reviewed.

The counter already reads past a million

Pera built its own scoreboard into Pera Explorer, whose homepage now carries two live counters, 'Quantum-Resilient Transactions' and 'Quantum-Resilient Accounts,' alongside its usual chain statistics. On September 6 the API behind that page returned 1,195,865 quantum-resilient transactions and 1,737 quantum-resilient accounts. That figure is Pera's own telemetry rather than an independent network census, and it lands in the same range as milestones the Algorand Foundation has been announcing since launch: 250,000+ transactions four days after native accounts went live on Pera (with the Foundation's Telegram noting that count excluded State Proofs), a reported 500,000 around September 2, and news coverage on September 5 of the network crossing one million post-quantum transactions, citing an announcement from Algorand's own account. News summaries of those later milestones have described the totals inconsistently — one notes they include State Proofs — so Pera's account-level counter, which tracks only transactions signed from Falcon accounts, is the cleaner figure to watch.

Context matters for reading it: 1,737 quantum accounts sits against roughly 21.1 million ALGO holders on the network, a sliver of adoption two weeks after launch. That is what early, fully opt-in migration looks like. What is independently verifiable on-chain is the accompanying claim campaign, which has drawn thousands of real participants. Pera is issuing three commemorative NFTs through a claim site that reads a wallet's public transaction history to determine eligibility — nothing is signed at that step. The assets are minted by Pera's own long-standing NFT address, the same one that created its Baby Governor governance-period collectibles across the years, and are being handed out one unit per eligible account by a distributor funded on August 21, the same week v5 went live. Exhaustive indexer counts show 2,884 real transfers of the Pioneer tier, 1,663 of Vanguard and 1,463 of Sentinel since minting, with the most recent transfers on September 5 — claims are still flowing:

Chart: On-chain transfers of Pera's Quantum NFTs by tier, Aug 21 – Sep 6

A free NFT, and other asterisks

The tiered giveaway is worth looking at honestly: it is a promotional campaign, and it does real promotional work for Pera. Claiming requires a Quantum Account and transactions, which means the campaign funnels usage into the freshly rebuilt wallet and pushes the very counter on Pera's own Explorer that its marketing now quotes. Pera also runs the wallet whose Explorer hosts the 'quantum-resilient' tallies, so the headline numbers are self-measured, and the Algorand Foundation — which set a 2027 target to move its own treasury to post-quantum accounts — has its own interest in the network's migration story. None of that makes the mechanism fake; it makes the incentives worth naming alongside the numbers.

Pera's materials, to its credit, name the genuine tradeoffs rather than burying them. The claim page's 'Good to Know' section states plainly that elliptic-curve cryptography 'has decades of real-world testing, while FALCON-1024 is a newer NIST-standardized scheme,' and that users should choose the option matching their risk tolerance — an honest concession that the quantum threat is a future one and that Falcon, however well-reviewed, has far less battle history than Ed25519. The wallet's open-source repository shows active maintenance behind the launch: version 7.1.1 shipped August 23 carrying the account flows, 7.1.3 followed on August 31, and commits continued into early September. Adoption is small, the campaign is self-referential, and the fee premium is permanent for those who move — but the migration is voluntary, the risks are disclosed, and the early on-chain claims are real. For a first two weeks, that is a defensible foundation.

Source

Source: https://perawallet.app/