Quantum Security Startup Project Eleven Acquires Riva Labs, Adding Post-Quantum Wallet Tech

Project Eleven, a startup preparing crypto networks for the arrival of powerful quantum computers, has acquired Riva Labs, a cryptography engineering team that builds post-quantum wallets and signing tools, the company said in a statement shared with Unchained on Tuesday.

The companies did not disclose the price or other terms. Riva’s team and technology will join Project Eleven’s research and product work on digital asset custody, blockchain security and post-quantum cryptography, according to the statement.

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Riva Labs has concentrated on hash-based signatures, one family of signature schemes designed to withstand attacks from quantum machines. It has applied that research to software wallets, hardware signers and multi-party computation (MPC) setups on Ethereum and other public chains, and has also worked on account abstraction. Project Eleven said Riva recently demonstrated post-quantum signing on consumer hardware, and that the deal includes the intellectual property Riva built along the way.

“Riva Labs is exactly the kind of talent we want at Project Eleven: deeply technical and focused on turning cryptographic research into systems that can actually be deployed,” said Alex Pruden, Project Eleven’s CEO and co-founder, in the statement. He added that the acquisition “accelerates our ability to lead the transition to post-quantum security across digital assets.”

Project Eleven pitched the purchase as a way to handle the migration as a single problem, instead of tackling signatures, wallets, key management and protocol infrastructure one at a time. The company also said AI is speeding up both cryptographic research and cryptanalysis, the study of how to defeat cryptographic systems, and that AI is central to how Riva does its own research and engineering.

Matteo Vena, a co-founder of Riva Labs, said the two teams “came at this problem from different directions and reached many of the same conclusions about what the industry needs.”

“Upgrading the public networks the future will run on, without compromising the properties that make them valuable in the first place, is a monumental challenge,” Vena said in the statement.

Most blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, secure wallets with signature schemes that a large enough quantum computer could in theory break, which is why developers are weighing upgrades to quantum-resistant alternatives. Pruden has told Unchained he believes moving to post-quantum cryptography would be a larger upgrade than anything blockchains have gone through before.

Project Eleven raised $20 million in a Series A round in January. It has worked with the Solana Foundation to run quantum-resistant transactions on a test network, and Ripple is working with the firm on validator testing and early custody prototypes as it works to make the XRP Ledger quantum-resistant.

Related Listen: One Type of Post-Quantum Cryptography Is Most Popular. Why Is Crypto Trying Out Three?

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