Post-Quantum Signatures, Part 2: From Trees to Forests

## Executive Summary: This article provides a concise technical overview of Merkle Signature Scheme (MSS), XMSS and XMSS^MT, covering Merkle tree commitments, L-tree leaf compression, address-based randomized (XOR) hashing, key generation, signature generation/verification flows, scaling via hyper-trees, and the operational risks of stateful signatures; it is an explanatory piece on post-quantum hash-based signatures rather than a report of a security incident.