Quantum Resilient Smart Contracts for Ethical Governance and Sustainable Circular Economy Innovations

Abstract

Background: Quantum computing poses a threat to classical signatures, like ECDSA, and makes long-lived blockchain smart contracts, particularly those used in a system of the circular economy and sustainability, susceptible to future forgery and governance attacks. Abstract: This paper presents a quantum resilient smart contract lattice architecture to achieve ethical governance and resource tracking in the use of a circular economy and maintain realistic performance. Methods: The architecture uses a NIST‑track lattice‑based post‑quantum signature scheme (CRYSTALS‑Dilithium) with one signature per transaction in an Ethereum‑like environment, adds batched post‑quantum verification opcodes to the virtual machine and a post‑quantum‑aware gas model, and introduces Solidity contracts for recycle passports, tokenized waste‑management incentives, and DAO‑based governance. Ethical governance is operationalized using a transparency index together with quantitative fairness and inclusiveness measures derived from reward distributions and participation rates. Results: The proposed framework has a 2.0 ms verification latency, 450 transactions per block, 70% relative throughput, and 130 GB/year storage, compared to 2.8 ms verification, 268 transactions per block, 55% relative throughput, and 140 GB/year storage in the hybrid post‑quantum baseline and the classical ECDSA configuration. Conclusion: These findings suggest quantum resilient smart contracts are a promising basis of long-horizon circular economy governance, which provides superior security and ethics by design assurances and sustains competitive performance and sustainability attributes compared to both classical and hybrid post-quantum baselines.