The warning sounded in Seoul
During the World Digital Assets Forum, held at the Grand Lotte Seoul, Felix Eigelshoven, managing director and Asia-Pacific head of the digital asset custody platform DFNS, addressed cryptographic security in the face of advances in quantum computing and artificial intelligence. According to The Korea Herald, the speaker titled his talk by asking whether what is held today will still be safe in ten years. The central thesis is that the digital asset industry cannot postpone its preparations.
Eigelshoven explained that the risk is not confined to blockchains. Financial institutions, telecommunications companies and other sectors use cryptographic signatures to authenticate transactions and protect digital assets: if the cryptography underpinning these systems is weakened, the fragility spreads well beyond the perimeter of cryptocurrencies.
The dual factor: quantum and artificial intelligence
In his talk, Eigelshoven observed that advances in quantum computing do not come only from large laboratories: smaller organizations have also made significant strides in building quantum computers. To this, he said, is added the emergence of artificial intelligence agents and human-machine teams increasingly used to explore and identify vulnerabilities, as well as to develop attacks.
The combination of the two phenomena, according to the DFNS executive, is accelerating the timeline of a threat the industry has long discussed. It would therefore not be a remote scenario, but a deadline approaching faster than companies are prepared to face.
The proposed recipe: modularity and an intermediate layer
The answer indicated by Eigelshoven is not a single technology but a design method. Organizations should build more agile infrastructures and protocols, revise trust models to avoid depending on a single point of approval, and adopt modular architectures in which individual components can be replaced when security requirements change.
The speaker also warned against excessive dependence on specific technology vendors, arguing for the need to be able to change hardware, storage systems and infrastructure without having to rebuild the entire operation. To make all this possible, he proposed adding an intermediate logical layer to the architecture that houses the organization’s own policies and rules, leaving the choice of blockchain, technology stack and infrastructure downstream.
According to Eigelshoven, this approach applies both to those developing a blockchain and to those building a platform or an organization: flexibility must be a design requirement, not a later addition.
Several aspects remain to be verified: the material does not indicate what migration timelines have been quantified, nor which post-quantum cryptographic standards were discussed at the forum. The costs of modular architectures are also not specified, nor are the concrete results achieved so far by the companies that have adopted them. The statements reported remain the declarations of a DFNS executive and should be read as such.
