The mechanism, end to end. From key generation to immutable artifact.
How a Falcon-1024 signature, an Algorand smart contract, and a numbered Vault Cell combine to produce an inscription that survives the cryptographic break.
Cryptography has an expiration date.
The signatures securing most of the world's value today — ECDSA on Bitcoin, on Ethereum, on every major chain — rest on the difficulty of the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. Shor's algorithm, run on a sufficiently large quantum computer, solves it. Not theoretically. Mathematically.
NIST published the first post-quantum signature standards in FIPS 204 (ML-DSA / Dilithium) and FIPS 206 (FN-DSA / Falcon) in 2024. The schemes exist. The deployment is what's missing.
Falcon-1024, briefly: a lattice problem the future cannot solve.
Falcon is a hash-and-sign signature scheme over NTRU lattices, instantiated through the Gentry-Peikert-Vaikuntanathan (GPV) framework with a fast-Fourier sampler as its discrete-Gaussian trapdoor. Verification reduces to a polynomial-arithmetic check in ℤq[x] / (xn+1) at n = 1024, q = 12289. The hardness assumption is the Short Integer Solution problem over NTRU lattices — a worst-case lattice problem for which no efficient quantum algorithm is known, and which sits inside the family of average-case lattice problems whose hardness Regev's quantum reduction grounds in worst-case GapSVP.
1,793 bytes
Larger than ECDSA, but stable. Sits comfortably inside Algorand's transaction footprint.
~1,280 bytes (avg)
One of the most compact PQ-secure signatures in the NIST standard set.
Sub-cent on Algorand
The native TEAL opcode performs the verification at consensus, not at the application layer. No off-chain trust required.
NIST FIPS 206
Published 2024. Algorand selected Falcon as its first-class PQ scheme based on signature compactness and verification cost.
Algorand is the only Layer-1 where this is already in production.
In November 2025, the Algorand Foundation activated a native Falcon-1024 verification opcode at the TEAL layer. Smart contracts can verify lattice-based signatures on-chain, at consensus-secured finality. No other major Layer-1 has this primitive: Bitcoin Script cannot do it; EVM does not have it.
The Algorand Foundation has done the cryptography work, the implementation work, and the deployment work. The substrate exists. TRELYAN is what gets inscribed on top of it.
From key generation to a permanent artifact, in five steps.
The Cell holder generates a Falcon-1024 keypair locally — never shared, never escrowed. The public key binds to the Cell at acquisition; the private key never leaves the holder's control.
The holder composes the artifact: text, code, image bytes, or any payload up to 4 KB. Encoding and content are the holder's choice; the contract is content-agnostic.
The holder signs the artifact with the Falcon-1024 private key bound to the Cell. The signature, the public key, and the artifact bytes form the inscription transaction payload.
The Algorand smart contract verifies the signature via the native Falcon TEAL opcode. The verification is deterministic, on-chain, at consensus-secured finality. No oracle. No off-chain trust.
The contract writes the artifact hash (and, optionally, the artifact bytes themselves) into the Cell's state, transitioning the Cell from Sealed to Inscribed. The binding is permanent.
Pre-sale Cells become Released — freely transferable — when both (a) they have been inscribed and (b) 24 months have elapsed from genesis. The inscription travels with the Cell forever.
A small, named, auditable trust surface.
The protocol asks the user to trust three propositions, each of which is independently auditable. (1) That Falcon-1024 is hard to break — that is, that the Short Integer Solution problem over NTRU lattices retains its average-case hardness against polynomial-time quantum adversaries; the NIST standardization in FIPS 206 is the public artifact of that proposition. (2) That Algorand consensus is sound — that the cryptographic-sortition Pure Proof-of-Stake protocol delivers safety and liveness under the partially-synchronous threat model assumed by the 2019 mainnet deployment. (3) That the TRELYAN inscription contract behaves as specified — open-source TEAL audited by an independent firm prior to mainnet deployment, with the audit report published alongside the contract address.
The user does not trust the founder, the foundation, a custodian, a multisig committee, or any off-chain process. The protocol is the trust boundary; everything else is documentation around it.