AERE Network Is the First Public EVM Layer-1 With Native NIST Post-Quantum Signature Verification Live on Mainnet

Half-second finality, typical fees below a cent, and a research record anyone can check: the settlement layer built for the day today's cryptography breaks.

Monaco, July 18, 2026: AERE Network, a public EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain (Chain ID 2800), has published the complete research record behind a capability that, to the project's knowledge, no other public EVM Layer-1 offers: native, protocol-level verification of NIST-standardized post-quantum signatures, live on mainnet. The publication comes alongside two further proofs of the network's engineering discipline: an independently implemented second client that reproduces the chain byte for byte at every height checked, and public endpoints any wallet can verify, where each served block header reconstructs its own block hash.

The problem every blockchain has, and almost none is fixing

Every major blockchain today, from Bitcoin to Ethereum, secures accounts and transactions with elliptic-curve signatures. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm breaks that mathematics outright. Because blockchains are public and permanent, the threat is present-tense. Security agencies call the encryption version of it "harvest now, decrypt later"; for signatures the analogue is starker: public keys recorded today become forgeable the day the mathematics falls. The exposure of long-lived keys (treasuries, institutional holdings, high-frequency AI agents) has already begun. NIST finalized the post-quantum signature standards in 2024. Migrating blockchains to them is the industry's unsolved homework.

What AERE shipped

AERE moved the NIST post-quantum verifiers into the engine of the chain itself. Five native precompiled contracts, covering Falcon-512, Falcon-1024, ML-DSA-44 (FIPS 204), SLH-DSA-128s (FIPS 205), and the SHAKE256 hash (FIPS 202), activated on AERE mainnet on July 12, 2026 at block 9,189,161. All five pass the official NIST Known-Answer Tests, and an end-to-end Falcon verification is recorded on mainnet for anyone to inspect. In practice, an account or smart contract on AERE can require a quantum-resistant signature before it moves value, natively and at protocol cost.

The stack around the precompiles is live too: post-quantum threshold custody (accounts controlled by a committee of quantum-resistant signers, with no single key and no administrator) and a governed crypto-agility registry, so the network can rotate to newer schemes as standards evolve. Alongside them sit usability features such as passkey wallets, which replace seed phrases with the device unlock people already use; passkeys run on today's standard cryptography and are covered by the same agility registry.

Built to be checked, not believed

AERE's position is that a settlement network should be verifiable rather than trusted, and it applies that standard to itself:

• The research is public. The full paper on the post-quantum fork, the AERE Improvement Proposals, and the verification record (49 machine-checked consensus properties, SMT-proved over the protocol model, and 15 symbolic-execution proofs over the core contracts) are published under a public-domain license at github.com/aerenetwork/aere-research.
• A second, independent client agrees with the chain. A separately implemented client, built on a different codebase in a different programming language, connects to the live network and has reproduced AERE's blocks and world state byte for byte at every height checked so far: a live run verified through block 182,777, and a permanent, non-validating follower node is now replaying the full chain history from genesis.
• The data is verifiable. An earlier fee-display shim was retired in July 2026; the public endpoints now serve the chain's real fee market, and every served block header reconstructs its own block hash, so wallets, auditors, and light clients can verify instead of trust. The network is listed in the canonical public chain registry used by major wallets, with two public RPC endpoints in geographically separate datacenters.
• The limits are stated. The validator set is seven Foundation-operated nodes today, all running the network's Besu-derived client and tolerating two faulty nodes (quorum five of seven); the independent second client runs as a non-validating follower, and the decentralization path is published in the project's roadmap and whitepaper. Mainnet consensus signing remains classical ECDSA; the post-quantum capability is at the account and application layer. That is deliberate sequencing: account keys are long-lived and permanently exposed on-chain, so they carry the harvest-now risk first, while validator keys can be rotated, and their migration is the audit-gated hybrid-consensus work described below. The live system has not yet completed a third-party audit; the published proofs and conformance tests are the project's own work, offered for anyone to re-run.

Fast enough to feel instant, economics sealed by code

AERE produces a block every half second, with deterministic finality: once a transaction is in a block, it is final, with no confirmation counts and no reorganizations. A typical transfer costs a fraction of a cent. The native token, AERE, has a fixed supply of 2.8 billion set at genesis, with no new minting and no insider unlock schedule; the genesis allocation is visible on-chain for anyone to inspect. A Foundation-set share of validator rewards, currently 37.5 percent and hard-capped at half by code, is routed to a sealed burn vault with no withdrawal path. The block parameters admit a design ceiling on the order of 273,000 transactions per second; that is a ceiling implied by the parameters, not a measured figure, and today's realized throughput is far below it. The published scaling roadmap, including a parallel execution engine already built in the client fork but not yet serving mainnet, is what closes that gap.

The network is also built for the machine economy: AERE402, an x402-compatible payment rail, lets AI agents pay per request with sub-second settlement, and an on-chain agent identity registry gives autonomous software a verifiable footing.

The road ahead

Work is underway, on isolated test networks, toward hybrid post-quantum consensus: blocks signed by validators with both classical and Falcon signatures at once, so the chain itself, not just its accounts, stands on quantum-resistant mathematics. The designs are machine-checked and public, and that upgrade ships only after an external audit. The project's thesis is one sentence long: final as math, safe when the math changes.

About AERE Network

AERE Network is a public, EVM-compatible Layer-1 settlement network (Chain ID 2800) built to outlast today's cryptography: half-second deterministic finality, typical fees below a cent, a fixed token supply, and native NIST post-quantum signature verification live at the account layer on mainnet, with hybrid post-quantum consensus under development and gated on external audit. Everything the network claims is designed to be checked by anyone, from the block explorer to the published research record.

• Website aere.network
• Explorer explorer.aere.network
• Research github.com/aerenetwork/aere-research (public domain)
• Whitepaper aere.network/whitepaper

Media contact: AERE Network Foundation, [email protected]

ENDS