Cloudflare will issue quantum-resistant certificates with Merkle Trees

Cloudflare is making strong progress on Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) after a successful experimental deployment with Chrome. The company’s move addresses a critical challenge in the shift to cryptography, an industry upgrade aimed for completion by 2029, by offering a solution to performance issues that would arise from simply swapping existing certificates. After gaining broad industry support, MTCs have emerged as the preferred path forward, allowing for transparency as a core property rather than an add-on. “Having a CA that supports both classical certificate and MTC issuance allows us to default to the most secure authentication method available,” Cloudflare states, providing a painless and performant upgrade path for a large portion of the internet. Cloudflare operated an earlier deployment in 2026, issuing Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) backed by traditional certificate chains for a subset of its domains on the “free” plan, and serving these to 50 percent of users…