Cryptocurrency exchanges are emerging as the clearest pressure point in Bitcoin’s long-running debate over quantum computing risk, sitting on millions of coins with publicly visible cryptographic keys. Bitcoin quantum risk begins with a fundamental feature of its transaction verification: public keys are hidden until funds are spent. Once a wallet signs a transaction, the public […]
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The quantum threat to Bitcoin may be far less concentrated than widely assumed — and that structural detail is quietly reshaping how developers and investors think about the risk. Related Reading: XRP Bulls Eye Breakout As Ripple Unveils 13,000 Bank Connections Worldwide A Distributed Problem, Not A Single Target Coins attributed to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto are spread across roughly 22,000 separate addresses, each holding 50 BTC. That means a quantum computer capable of cracking Bitcoin’s encryption would need to break thousands of individual wallets — not one massive target. According to Alex Thorn, a researcher who attended a recent industry gathering in Las Vegas, that reality is changing how experts frame the threat. The real high-value targets, Thorn noted, are large exchanges and active institutions — entities that can migrate to post-quantum addresses on their own if needed. The distinction between long-range and short-range quantum attacks matters here, too. Neutral atom quantum systems — a competing approach to the more widely known superconducting method — are only capable of long-range attacks. i had many discussions about quantum & bitcoin in las vegas this week, both on and off stage, with skeptics, advocates, and many overall smart bitcoiners some consensus i feel is emerging: 1) satoshi’s coins (P2PK) should not be touched. violating his property rights could be… — Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) May 2, 2026 Google recently opened a neutral atom lab shortly before publishing a major quantum computing paper. Some observers read that move as a quiet acknowledgment that superconducting technology may have limits, though the company has not said so directly. Property Rights And The Satoshi Question The question of whether Bitcoin’s protocol should ever be changed to address Satoshi’s coins drew strong opinions. Based on Thorn’s account of discussions at the event, a rough consensus formed: those coins should not be touched. if you haven’t yet, watch the great discussion between @reardencode @jamesob @cryptoquick @apruden08 at @TheBitcoinConf last week https://t.co/2F52Jwkgzo — Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) May 2, 2026 Altering the protocol to move or freeze them would undermine a foundational principle — that property rights on the Bitcoin network are inviolable. Violating that principle, even with good intentions, could do lasting damage to the network’s credibility. Still, experts acknowledged the risk from Satoshi’s coins is manageable. Proposals like the “hourglass” mechanism could be activated if a long-range quantum attack appeared imminent. On-chain data cited by Thorn also shows Bitcoin markets have regularly absorbed over 1 million BTC in a short window — meaning even a worst-case scenario involving a 50% price drop might be survivable if property rights were preserved in the process. The Case For Quiet Research On the question of developing post-quantum cryptography for Bitcoin, the Las Vegas conversations pointed toward a clear middle ground. Background research — building, testing, and compressing new cryptographic signatures — was broadly seen as worthwhile, even if implementation remains years away. Related Reading: Bitcoin’s Path To $100K May Happen Before Anyone Understands Why: Analyst The concern is not the research itself but how it gets introduced. Adding something untested to the protocol, or triggering governance gridlock while other upgrades wait, are the real dangers to avoid. Featured image from Gemini, chart from TradingView
Ripple’s escrow accounts are among the wallets that may not be as protected as they appear. A new breakdown of every account on the XRP Ledger found that multi-signature wallets — including those tied to Ripple — hold 36.60 billion XRP, or over 36% of the total supply, but are not automatically shielded from future quantum threats without proper key management. Related Reading: Bitcoin Bull Run Brewing: ATH In Sight By Late 2026: Analyst What The Numbers Show The analysis was conducted by XRPL validator Vet, who reviewed all 7,810,364 accounts on the XRP Ledger. Based on that review, 23.16 billion XRP currently sits in wallets considered safe from quantum attack. That works out to 27% of all accounts — roughly 2.13 million wallets. Two factors account for their safety: either the wallets have never signed a transaction, meaning the public key has never been exposed, or the account holders rotated their keys and disabled master keys as an extra security step. The first group covers over 24% of accounts. The second, more deliberate group accounts for 2.65%. The logic is straightforward. When a wallet signs a transaction, its public key becomes visible on the ledger. A sufficiently advanced quantum computer could theoretically use that public key to work backward and derive the private key. Wallets that have never signed anything don’t have that exposure. Did a Full History deep dive on all 7.8M XRP Accounts for Quantum Threat exposure targeting dormant accounts. Genesis XRP accounts, the Satoshi Era equivalent, is 0.02% of all XRP supply that is dormant and exposed. Exposed supply increases as dormancy thresholds are lowered.… https://t.co/AxINT1RaXV pic.twitter.com/QvZD8zBCNg — Vet (@Vet_X0) April 29, 2026 Dormant Accounts Raise Hard Questions On the other side of the ledger, 76.82 billion XRP spread across 5.6 million accounts is considered exposed. But Vet noted that 96% of that amount belongs to users who are still active — people who, when the time comes, can move their funds to safer addresses. The harder problem is dormant accounts. Wallets that have been inactive for five or more years hold 2.94% of the total XRP supply, which amounts to 3.83% of all exposed XRP. At the far end, accounts with no activity since before 2014 represent just 0.02% of total supply. Reports indicate that group includes only 14,710 accounts, compared to 1.33 million in the five-year inactive category. For context, Vet pointed to Bitcoin, where holdings tied to Satoshi Nakamoto make up roughly 5% of total supply — much of which may never be moved. Nobody knows why dormant wallets were abandoned. Lost keys, forgotten accounts, and personal circumstances all come into play. That uncertainty makes them the most difficult part of the quantum exposure problem. A 2028 Deadline Already In Motion The XRP Ledger currently uses Ed25519 and secp256k1 cryptographic standards. Both remain secure today, but could become vulnerable as quantum computing advances. Related Reading: WLFI Selloff Deepens After Controversial Governance Vote Goes Live Ripple has laid out a four-phase roadmap aimed at making the network fully quantum-resistant by 2028. Early testing of new systems is already underway, with updates to the main network planned for later phases. The long-term fix for exposed wallets is expected to involve quantum-resistant encryption that lets users migrate funds to better-protected addresses. That works for people who still have access. For those who don’t — whether due to lost credentials or other circumstances — the exposure may be permanent. Featured image from ForkLog, chart from TradingView
On Apr. 24, Project Eleven awarded its Q-Day Prize to Giancarlo Lelli, a researcher who used publicly accessible quantum hardware to derive a 15-bit elliptic curve private key from its public key. This is the largest public demonstration to date of the attack class that could one day threaten Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other system […]
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NIST finalized its first three post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024 and told organizations to begin migrating immediately, with a 2035 deadline to deprecate quantum-vulnerable public-key algorithms from its guidelines. Coinbase's advisory board reached the same conclusion in a recent report, arguing that blockchains, wallet providers, exchanges, and custodians should prepare before urgency arrives, and […]
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Ripple is building a multi-stage plan to prepare the XRP Ledger (XRPL) for an eventual shift to post-quantum cryptography, setting a 2028 target for full readiness. This comes as advances in quantum computing force blockchain developers to think more concretely about how existing security systems may need to change in preparation for “Q-day.” The company […]
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Bitcoin's debate about quantum computers produced a published draft with real political consequences on Apr. 14. Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 361 (BIP 361), titled “Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset,” landed in Bitcoin's official proposal repository with a three-phase plan to phase out ECDSA and Schnorr signature spends entirely once a quantum-resistant output type exists […]
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Anthropic's Mythos threat to the crypto industry can trigger hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in sudden, irreversible losses. That is the stark reality facing digital asset markets following Anthropic’s quiet unveiling of Claude Mythos Preview, a vulnerability-seeking AI model the San Francisco startup admits is simply too dangerous to release to the […]
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The state of quantum computing and what it would take to threaten Bitcoin Quantum computing has advanced materially over the past 18 months, but the field remains in the transition from noisy hardware to early fault tolerance. The key shift is away from raw physical-qubit counts and toward logical qubits, gate fidelity, runtime, and error […]
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Algorand has emerged as an early standout in the crypto market’s latest quantum security debate after a recent Google Quantum AI paper highlighted the blockchain as a live example of post-quantum cryptography being deployed on a network. The attention came as the paper sharpened concerns around Bitcoin and Ethereum, two networks whose size, age, and […]
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On Mar. 30, Google Quantum AI published a 57-page whitepaper coauthored with Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation and Dan Boneh of Stanford. The paper demonstrates that breaking the 256-bit elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem, the cryptographic foundation underlying most blockchain transactions, requires roughly 500,000 physical qubits, a 20-fold reduction from prior estimates. That compression means […]
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A new paper from Google Quantum AI has sharply reduced the estimated hardware required to crack elliptic-curve cryptography used by Bitcoin and much of Ethereum, moving a long-running security debate closer to market terms. At current market prices, the quantum computing risks could affect more than $600 billion in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins. The paper, […]
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The crypto industry has framed its quantum reckoning as a single catastrophic “Q-Day” moment when a sufficiently powerful machine arrives, old cryptographic keys shatter, and blockchain history unravels. This week, that moment may have been brought forward into this decade. The Ethereum Foundation's Mar. 24 post-quantum (PQ) roadmap shows that the realistic quantum threat to […]
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In this week’s Crypto Long & Short Newsletter, Martin Gaspar on how bitcoin looks to overcome quantum fears, echoing past climate backlash.
Bitcoin's current bear market could worsen over the next year if the flagship digital asset fails to address concerns about quantum computing. In a Feb. 20 report, Charles Edwards, Capriole founder, claimed that Bitcoin’s market value should already be discounted for quantum risk and warned that the discount could deepen quickly if the network does […]
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Bitcoin developer contributors just cleared a documentation hurdle that crypto Twitter treated like an emergency quantum patch. It wasn't. On Feb. 11, a proposal for a new output type, Pay-to-Merkle-Root (BIP-0360), was merged into the official Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository. No nodes upgraded. No activation timeline exists. The BIPs repository itself warns that publication doesn't […]
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Ethereum elevated post-quantum cryptography to a top strategic priority this month, forming a dedicated PQ team led by Thomas Coratger and announcing $1 million in prizes to harden hash-based primitives. The announcement came one day before a16z crypto published a roadmap arguing that quantum threats are frequently overstated and premature migrations risk trading known security […]
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The consensus that Bitcoin has matured into “digital gold” faces a new fracture line on Wall Street, one that has little to do with daily price volatility and everything to do with the distant future of computing. Two prominent strategists named Wood are currently offering diametrically opposed roadmaps to global allocators for the world’s largest […]
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Contrary to popular belief, quantum computers will not “crack” Bitcoin encryption; instead, any realistic threat would focus on exploiting digital signatures tied to exposed public keys. Quantum computers cannot decrypt Bitcoin because it stores no encrypted secrets on-chain. Ownership is enforced by digital signatures and hash-based commitments, not ciphertext. The quantum risk that matters is […]
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Michael Saylor delivered a characteristically bold take on Dec. 16 about Bitcoin and the quantum leap: “The Bitcoin Quantum Leap: Quantum computing won't break Bitcoin—it will harden it. The network upgrades, active coins migrate, lost coins stay frozen. Security goes up. Supply comes down. Bitcoin grows stronger.” The statement captures the optimistic case for Bitcoin's […]
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Crypto hackers had a busy year in 2024 and cybersecurity experts warn that continued advances in artificial intelligence could bring new attack vectors in 2025.