AmericanFortress Raises $8M, Files Quantum-Proof Patent

AmericanFortress, the developer of a Universal Privacy Layer for blockchain transactions, announced on 5 May 2026 that it has closed an US$8 million seed round and filed a patent for quantum-resistant cryptographic transaction signing. The round was co-led by SAVA Digital Asset Fund, Moon Pursuit Capital and 0G Labs, with the patent positioned as the centrepiece of the company’s pitch: a retrofit-able post-quantum security layer for chains that currently rely on elliptic curve cryptography.

The quantum threat AmericanFortress is targeting

The technical case AmericanFortress is making is straightforward, if uncomfortable for the industry. Every major blockchain — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the networks built on top of them — secures wallets and authorises transactions using elliptic curve cryptography. ECC works because deriving a private key from a public key is computationally infeasible for classical computers. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm changes that equation: it can derive the private key from any public key, allowing an attacker to drain any wallet whose public key has appeared on-chain. That covers the majority of active wallets in existence.

The timeline for the threat has been pulled forward sharply over the past year. Grayscale Research argued in April 2026 that the harder challenge is no longer engineering but decentralised governance — specifically, what to do with the millions of legacy wallets whose public keys are already exposed on-chain. The U.S. government has set a 2035 deadline for federal agencies to be quantum-resistant, NIST finalised three post-quantum encryption standards in August 2024, and Europol’s Quantum-Safe Financial Forum has urged banks to begin inventorying vulnerable keys.

What the patent covers

AmericanFortress’s filing covers what the company describes as a quantum-resistant public derivation scheme that is compatible with quantum-proof signatures. The architectural choice the company is highlighting is that the scheme is designed as a retrofit — adoptable by existing chains without forcing a hard-fork to a brand-new cryptographic stack — and licensable to any blockchain seeking equivalent protection.

The result, in AmericanFortress’s framing, is that every Send-to-Name transaction inside its system is quantum-safe end-to-end. The company is positioning the technology for both human users and AI agents — a relevant scope given the parallel rise of agentic on-chain activity, including Binance Wallet’s keyless agentic wallet launched in late April.

Why 0G Labs is the launch chain

0G Labs, the AI-focused Layer-1 protocol, is a co-lead investor and has committed to being the first chain to deploy the quantum-proof signing technology in production. The fit is logical: 0G’s stated remit is the foundational infrastructure for an AI-native economy, and AI agents transacting at machine speed across exposed public keys multiply the surface area for any future quantum attack.

“At 0G, we’re building the foundational infrastructure for an AI-native economy and that infrastructure must be secure against threats that don’t yet exist at scale but will,” said Michael Heinrich, Chief Executive Officer of 0G Labs. “AmericanFortress has solved how to make blockchain transactions genuinely quantum-resistant without sacrificing usability, compliance, or privacy.” Heinrich framed the deployment as an immediate priority rather than a roadmap item: “Post-quantum security isn’t a future feature, but a present necessity. 0G is proud to be the first chain to bring this technology to production.”

The privacy layer beneath the patent

The quantum-proof signing technology sits on top of an infrastructure stack that AmericanFortress has been building since launch. The company describes its product as the first complete privacy infrastructure for blockchain transactions, combining human-readable Send-to-Name addresses, stealth address privacy, zero-knowledge balance confidentiality, built-in compliance, and now post-quantum security in a single system that works across every supported chain.

The Send-to-Name layer is the consumer-facing piece. According to the company, more than US$1.2 billion was lost to crypto phishing scams in the United States alone in 2025, with copy-paste address attacks one of the most common vectors. Send-to-Name replaces wallet strings with one-time stealth addresses generated for each unique sender-receiver pair, known only to the two parties involved.

“We invented Send-to-Name to make crypto as easy and safe as sending a Venmo,” said Michał “MeHow” Pospieszalski, Chief Executive Officer of AmericanFortress. “Now, with this patent filing, we’re adding a layer of security that protects every transaction against the quantum threat horizon. We’re proud to be the first naming and privacy infrastructure to file for post-quantum transaction signing.”

Use of proceeds and the $AF TGE

The seed round funds two parallel workstreams. The first is the production deployment of AmericanFortress’s privacy infrastructure across additional chains, with the 0G integration as the lead reference customer. The second is the company’s $AF token generation event, scheduled for Q2 2026.

The token will be the economic layer underneath the privacy network — a structure broadly consistent with how other privacy-focused infrastructure providers have monetised. The TGE timeline gives AmericanFortress a roughly two-month runway from the announcement to either ship the token or push the schedule, and aligns the funding raise with the public visibility of the patent filing.

Where this fits in the broader quantum push

AmericanFortress is not the only firm raising into the quantum-resistance category, but its retrofit-and-license positioning differentiates it from greenfield post-quantum chains like QRL or QANplatform. Project Eleven, a comparable post-quantum infrastructure firm focused on Bitcoin, raised a US$6 million seed round earlier in 2025 with its Yellowpages tool, while Circle’s Arc project has been racing to implement post-quantum protections inside the USDC stack.

Google’s recent published research on quantum vulnerabilities in existing cryptographic schemes has accelerated the conversation. The combination of NIST’s 2024 standards, the EU and US drafting custodian-level disclosure requirements, and the public arrival of harvest-now-decrypt-later attack scenarios is steadily moving the question from “if” to “when” for institutional balance sheets — and from there, to specific procurement decisions about which post-quantum stack to license.

That dynamic is exactly the gap AmericanFortress is positioning to fill. By offering a retrofit licensable to any chain rather than a new chain that requires migration, the company is betting that the path of least resistance for existing networks is to bolt on quantum protection rather than ask users to move. Whether that bet pays off depends on how quickly Bitcoin, Ethereum and the larger Layer-2 ecosystems decide to move, and whether they do it via in-house engineering or third-party licensing.

FAQ

What is AmericanFortress?
AmericanFortress is a blockchain privacy and security infrastructure company building what it describes as a Universal Privacy Layer for digital asset transactions. The platform combines human-readable Send-to-Name addresses, stealth address privacy, zero-knowledge balance confidentiality, built-in compliance, and quantum-resistant transaction signing in a single system that works across multiple chains.

What does the patent filing cover?
The patent filing covers AmericanFortress’s quantum-resistant public derivation scheme, which the company describes as compatible with quantum-proof signatures. The technology is designed as a retrofit for existing blockchains — addressing the threat that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could derive private keys from publicly visible blockchain addresses — and is being licensed to other chains seeking equivalent protection.

Who led the seed round and what comes next?
The US$8 million seed round was co-led by SAVA Digital Asset Fund, Moon Pursuit Capital and 0G Labs. 0G Labs is the first chain to deploy the quantum-proof signing technology in production. AmericanFortress will use the proceeds to accelerate production deployment of its privacy infrastructure and support its $AF token generation event, targeted for Q2 2026.

The strategic question for AmericanFortress is whether retrofit licensing scales faster than vertical integration on a dedicated post-quantum chain. With Grayscale, Google, NIST, and a growing list of regulators publicly calling for action, the demand side of the equation looks set to expand sharply over the next 24 months. Whether AmericanFortress’s licensable architecture becomes the de facto post-quantum upgrade path — or simply one of several competing standards — will be the practical test through the rest of 2026 and into 2027.