A free, hybrid conference on enterprise migration to post-quantum cryptography, 1 to 3 December 2026 at Meervaart in Amsterdam. Organised by the non-profit PKI Consortium, it runs a Strategic track for C-suite, risk officers and programme leads alongside a Technical track for architects and DevOps teams. It is the fifth edition of a series that has previously run in Ottawa, Amsterdam, Austin and Kuala Lumpur.
The Post-Quantum Cryptography Conference is a three-day event on the practical migration of enterprise systems to post-quantum cryptography, the family of algorithms designed to withstand attack by a future large-scale quantum computer. It is organised by the PKI Consortium, a non-profit membership body whose members include certificate authorities, hardware security module makers and enterprise security suppliers, and it is free to attend both in person and online. The 2026 edition runs 1 to 3 December at Meervaart in Amsterdam and is the fifth in a series that began in Ottawa in 2023. Its subject is deployment rather than discovery: rolling out the NIST-standardised algorithms (ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA), building crypto-agility into existing systems, automating certificate estates, and running hybrid classical/PQC TLS during the transition.
Most of the quantum-tech calendar is about building quantum computers. This event is about what every other organisation has to do because they are being built. Nothing on the programme depends on a working cryptographically relevant quantum machine existing yet: the risk model is harvest-now-decrypt-later, the standards are already published, and the work in question is inventory, sequencing and replacement across systems that were never designed to have their cryptography swapped out. That reframing is the reason the room looks different from the rest of the vertical. Attendees are enterprise security architects, PKI owners, compliance leads and vendor engineers rather than physicists.
The organiser splits the programme into two parallel tracks aimed at distinct roles. The split is unusually explicit, and it is the clearest guide to whether the event is worth your time.
| Strategic track | Technical track | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | C-suite, risk officers, programme and PMO leads | Security architects, cryptography engineers, DevOps and platform teams |
| The question it answers | When do we have to migrate, and what does it cost? | How do we change algorithms without breaking production? |
| Topics named by the organiser | Regulatory compliance under NIS2 and DORA, budget and vendor assessment, migration timelines | CI/CD crypto-agility, certificate automation, PQC tooling |
| Standards touchpoint | Board-level reporting on adoption of the NIST PQC standards | Deployment of ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA, hybrid classical/PQC TLS |
Amsterdam hosted the second edition of this series in 2023, and the conference returns there for its fifth. The series has deliberately moved between continents rather than settling in one city, which has kept the regulatory content varied: a European edition puts NIS2 and DORA at the centre of the Strategic track in a way a North American or Asian edition does not.
| When | Where |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Ottawa, Canada |
| 2023 | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| January 2025 | Austin, United States |
| October 2025 | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia |
| 1 - 3 December 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
The recurring subject areas across the three days are migration to post-quantum cryptography at enterprise scale, the NIST PQC standards and their deployment (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA), crypto-agility as an engineering property rather than a policy statement, compliance obligations under NIS2 and DORA, certificate lifecycle automation, and hybrid classical/PQC TLS as the transitional deployment pattern.
For a free conference, the sponsor list is the pricing signal. It is dominated by the suppliers an enterprise will actually have to buy from or configure during a PQC migration: certificate authorities, HSM vendors and certificate lifecycle management platforms. Anyone using the event as a market survey can treat the tiers below as a starting shortlist.
| Tier | Named companies |
|---|---|
| Diamond | IBM |
| Platinum | Crypto4A, Cryptomathic, Keyfactor, SSL.com, Entrust, HID Global, Utimaco |
| Also present, tier not disclosed | DigiCert, Sectigo |
Post-quantum cryptography now appears on the agenda of several events in this vertical, but with different centres of gravity. Quantum Networks Summit 2026 in Paris covers quantum-safe networking from a telecom infrastructure angle, closer to carriers and QKD deployment. Quantum Infra Summit EU 2026 in Leuven treats PQC deployment as one component of a broader infrastructure programme. This conference is the one that takes the enterprise migration project itself as its whole subject, which makes it the natural pick for a CISO office or a PKI team with a mandate and a deadline, and a poor pick for anyone tracking quantum hardware progress.
Enterprise security architects, PKI and certificate estate owners, cryptography engineers, DevOps and platform teams, alongside C-suite sponsors, risk officers and programme managers who own the migration budget. Vendors in the certificate authority, HSM and certificate automation market attend both as sponsors and as speakers.
Not for the Strategic track, which is built for executives, risk and programme roles and is framed around timelines, compliance and vendor assessment. The Technical track assumes working knowledge of PKI, TLS and build pipelines.
Only indirectly. The threat model comes from quantum computing, but the content is applied cryptography and enterprise migration. There is no quantum hardware programme, and the standards discussed run on classical systems.
Meervaart is a theatre and conference venue in the west of Amsterdam. The organiser publishes the exact address and access details on the event page. Because the conference is run as a hybrid, attendance does not require travel to the Netherlands.
The PKI Consortium is a non-profit membership organisation working on public key infrastructure standards and practice, with a membership drawn from certificate authorities, hardware security module vendors and enterprise security suppliers. It runs the Post-Quantum Cryptography Conference series as a free event, funded by sponsorship rather than delegate fees, which is why the sponsor tiers are published and the ticket price is not.
The rest of the quantum calendar sells a future capability; this one hands enterprise security teams a deadline, which is why the in-person seats went before the programme was final.
Registration is free, for both in-person and virtual attendance, through the event page on the PKI Consortium site. That makes it an outlier in this vertical, where most events are paid and in-person only: there is no delegate tier, no early-bird deadline and no academic rate to compare, because there is no fee at all. The trade-off is capacity. At the time of verification, in-person registration was reported full with a waitlist in operation, while virtual registration remained open. The practical advice is to secure a virtual place immediately and add your name to the in-person waitlist rather than treating the two as alternatives.
Yes. Both in-person and virtual attendance are free of charge. The event is funded through sponsorship by the vendors listed on the event page rather than through delegate fees.
Not directly, as things stood at last verification: in-person registration was reported full and a waitlist was operating. Registering for the waitlist and for virtual attendance at the same time is the safer route.
A place at the streamed programme, registered through the same event page. The organiser has not published which sessions are streamed or whether recordings are released afterwards, so check the event page close to the date if a specific session matters to you.
| Official event page | https://pkic.org/events/2026/pqc-conference-amsterdam-nl/ |
| Registration | https://pkic.org/events/2026/pqc-conference-amsterdam-nl/ |
| Organiser (PKI Consortium) | https://pkic.org |
| Programme | not disclosed |
| not disclosed |