Bison Bank and DK Bank have joined a cross-regional pilot that will test post-quantum wallet generation and digital-asset transfers in a shared application environment. Financial regulators from Abu Dhabi, Bhutan and Malta are participating initially as observers rather than operators.
The Responsible Fintech Institute, which is convening the project, and digital-asset custody infrastructure provider Safeheron announced the initiative on August 24. Safeheron is the technology partner, leading protocol and engineering work, while the institute is responsible for governance, convening and coordination among jurisdictions.
The pilot is a proof of concept, not a live payment network. Its announcement does not identify a launch timetable, transaction volumes, supported assets, payment corridors or production participants. It also does not report completed transfers or independent security testing.
What the banks will test
The technical work will combine multiparty computation with ML-DSA-65, the digital-signature algorithm standardized by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in FIPS 204. Testing will cover wallet generation and onchain transfers on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet.
Multiparty computation can divide responsibility for signing a transaction among separate parties or systems rather than concentrating it in one conventional private key. The organisers describe a tentative non-custodial 2-of-2 design intended to preserve institutional control while limiting operating complexity. Because the design remains tentative, the announcement should not be read as a final custody model or control framework.
The financial institutions are expected to examine operational, governance and interoperability questions alongside the cryptographic implementation. Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office and the Malta Financial Services Authority are named as regulatory participants. The regulators will observe the first phase and are expected to contribute to a governance workstream later; their levels of participation may differ.
That distinction is important for industry readers. Regulatory participation can improve the relevance of a controlled experiment, but it is not approval of the technology, a certification of its security or authorization for a commercial service.
Why payment infrastructure needs migration planning
Much of today’s financial infrastructure relies on public-key cryptography to authenticate messages, protect credentials and authorize transactions. A sufficiently capable quantum computer could threaten widely used public-key techniques, although the timing and capabilities of such systems remain uncertain.
NIST finalized its first three post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 and encouraged system administrators to begin integrating them because full migration will take time. ML-DSA, formalized in FIPS 204, is intended for digital signatures. In a wallet context, signatures are central to authorizing transfers, making implementation details, key-management design and compatibility with surrounding systems material operating issues.
For banks and payment providers, replacing an algorithm is only one part of migration. They must also inventory cryptographic dependencies, update hardware and software, preserve auditability, manage old and new methods during transition, and test how changes affect recovery, fraud controls and transaction authorization. A cross-jurisdiction pilot can expose governance and interoperability issues early, but a testnet cannot establish production resilience, throughput or legal finality.
Results and specifications are still pending
The organisers plan to publish a white paper covering the research, protocol design and test findings. They also say the underlying post-quantum protocol technology will eventually be open-sourced to support external review and security auditing.
Those deliverables will be more useful than the launch announcement for judging the project. Important questions include how the implementation handles key recovery and participant failure, whether legacy systems can interoperate with the new signing process, what independent cryptographic review finds, and how institutions would migrate without interrupting customer or settlement operations.
Until test results and implementation materials are available, the pilot should be treated as an early preparedness exercise. Its significance lies in bringing banks, regulators and a technology provider into the same controlled test—not in demonstrating that quantum-resistant digital-asset payments are ready for production.