Quantum computing exists beyond everyday comprehension, in an experimental if rapidly advancing phase that is particularly exciting for computer science and worrying for information security. It promises computational power on an almost unimaginable scale, along with the downside risk of neutralizing data encryption systems and exposing everything that they protect.
By all accounts it will take several more years for quantum’s potential to be felt, but preparations for risk mitigation cannot wait. Taking that realization especially seriously is the crypto- and digital-asset sector. It stands to reason, as cryptography is foundational to those ecosystems.
In April, Circle Internet Group announced a quantum-resistant design and roadmap for its Arc blockchain. It anticipates the coming of “Q-Day, the point at which a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can break” the security codes.
“Circle is actively planning for these risks,” said the U.S. stablecoin leader. “For banks, fintechs, other stablecoin issuers, RWA [real world asset] platforms, and global enterprises, long-term cryptographic durability is a baseline requirement that must be accounted for in infrastructure decisions being made today.”
Preceding Circle’s release, the Ethereum Foundation underscored this strategic priority by forming a post-quantum team. Coinbase, which has publicized its own “roadmap,” assembled an independent advisory board “to evaluate the implications of quantum computing for the blockchain ecosystem and provide clear, independent guidance to the broader community.”
Yehuda Lindell of Coinbase
The panel includes Coinbase head of cryptography Yehuda Lindell; Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and Stanford University computer scientist Dan Boneh, co-director of the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research.
“By bringing together the foremost experts in the world, Coinbase is ensuring that the blockchain ecosystem is prepared, not just reactive,” Lindell said in a blog.
Solana Foundation made a “quantum readiness” statement April 27 regarding a post-quantum digital signature scheme dubbed Falcon “designed for high-throughput blockchain use.” Saying “quantum is still years away,” Solana is eyeing “a clear, well-researched plan that can be activated if and when the time comes.”
The undermining of cryptography is a “real but distant” threat, as Benchmark Company research analyst Mark Palmer put it. This allows for time and technical flexibility to adapt well before the danger is acute.
“While classical computers would take trillions of years to guess a bitcoin private key,” said Palmer, as reported by CoinDesk, “a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive that key from a public address in minutes, effectively allowing an attacker to unmask and drain wallets at will.”
“Cryptography is buried deep in applications, spread across business units, and rarely owned by a single team,” says Simon Pamplin, chief technology officer of quantum-safe security vendor Certes, “With data sovereignty rising up the regulatory agenda, the pressure to control where data lives and how it’s protected has never been greater. Quantum risk makes that conversation urgent.”
Konstantinos Karagiannis of Protiviti
“Crypto depends heavily on public-key cryptography for wallet ownership, transaction signing, and network security, so a quantum break would threaten core system integrity, not just privacy,” states crypto entrepreneur and investor Felix Xu, co-founder and CEO of ARPA Network and Bella Protocol. “Unlike traditional systems, blockchains are difficult to patch once live, and they lack rollback mechanisms, which means compromised keys can lead to immediate and irreversible loss of assets.”
Konstantinos Karagiannis, senior director of quantum computing services at consulting firm Protiviti, is critical of the big crypto names’ post-quantum cryptography (PQC) positioning.
“Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have been slow to respond to this threat,” he contends. “I and others have been speaking publicly about this problem for almost a decade, but it hasn’t been a priority until relatively recently.”
He also points to PQC-related efforts of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) over a number of years.
Project Eleven, a PQC startup, offered and in April awarded a 1 bitcoin bounty, called the Q-Day Prize, “for breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on a publicly accessible quantum computer.”
“The resource requirements for this type of attack keep dropping, and the barrier to running it in practice is dropping with them,” said Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden. The fact that an independent researcher pulled it off on cloud-accessible hardware “highlights the urgency to migrate to post-quantum cryptography sooner rather than later. Google just committed to being quantum-secure by 2029. The window to get ahead of this is closing.”
Karagiannis agrees that the threat to crypto is an urgent matter and, in a sense, existential. The elliptic curve cryptography common in blockchains is hard to crack conventionally but presumably breakable in a quantum future.
Allan Francis Beechinor, chief AI strategist and co-founder of EmergeGen, says the crypto players naturally want to be out front and vocal: “The risk is obvious, and it’s talked about openly. But when you step back, the picture is a bit different. Long before crypto focused on this, governments and defense were already deep into it.”
“Even at the hardware level, this has been active for a long time,” Karagiannis adds. “So I wouldn’t say crypto is leading. It’s one of the few sectors where the risk is visible enough to talk about. In other industries, the same work is happening but just more quietly. And I think that’s what people are reacting to.”
The possibility that Q-Day will arrive sooner than expected brings business opportunities as well as security challenges.
Henning Soller of McKinsey
“Although challenges remain in scaling up quantum computing, financial institutions are shifting from creating proofs of concept to co-developing use cases with specialized quantum players,” says a February article by McKinsey & Co. partner Henning Soller with Martina Gschwendtner. “Hybrid computing – that is, running specific parts of a workflow on a quantum computer while processing the rest classically – allows institutions to harness near-term business value while using currently available hardware.”
As for the looming security threat, “solutions are being developed through changes in underlying security algorithms, such as post-quantum cryptography, and the advent of new technologies, such as quantum key distribution (QKD).”
A U.S. Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) advisory in January “highlighted several technology categories where PQC-compatible solutions are already available (or are in active transition) to help organizations evaluate purchase decisions and plan migration,” said a CSO report. The categories included cloud services, collaboration software, web software and endpoint security.
Symphony Communication Services, provider of a financial services industry collaborative messaging and workflow platform, discussed a year ago how it was “actively preparing for the quantum era – not as a theoretical exercise but as a necessity,” and “focused on developing deeply secure, quantum-ready financial communication platforms before they are needed.”
Quantum Model of Finance
Source: Symphony Communication Services report.
Proofs of concept were described in a year-end 2025 review by Vancouver, Canada-based BTQ Technologies for the Quantum Secure Stablecoin Network (QSSN): in Korea, spanning both commercial and banking channels; and for the Post Quantum Financial Infrastructure Framework (PQFIF) in the United States. That is aligned with NIST PQC standards, and “we expect to see the continuation of private and public organizations adopting QSSN to participate in the burgeoning digital-asset revolution while remaining compliant with cryptographic mandates,” BTQ said.
“If Q-Day was tomorrow, and a successful quantum attack hit a private-sector company, there’s a high likelihood that this particular company would survive,” Karagiannis says, citing companies’ ability to manage cyber breaches. But a quantum attack on Bitcoin could take the asset’s value down to zero, and other chains and cryptocurrency pegs down with it, Karagiannis warns.
In the Protiviti expert’s view, “the threat is in some ways even more urgent for cryptocurrency. This is why I’m comfortable saying they haven’t done enough yet.”
Jeffrey Kutler of GARP contributed reporting for this article.