Research The State of Post-Quantum Cryptography in 2026 14 min read The Standards Are Final. Now What? For eight years, from 2016 to 2024, the global cryptography community participated in NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. Hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries submitted 82 candidate algorithms. These candidates went through multiple rounds of public analysis, attack attempts, and performance benchmarking. In August 2024, NIST published three final standards: FIPS 203 (ML-KEM): Module Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism. This is the algorithm that protects encryption keys during exchange. When two parties need to agree on a shared secret to encrypt data, ML-KEM provides that exchange with quantum resistance. FIPS 204 (ML-DSA): Module Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm. This is for digital signatures, the cryptographic equivalent of a handwritten signature that proves a document has not been altered and verifies who created it.…