Timeline
- 7.5
Coinbase Builds Post-Quantum Bitcoin Custody Plan for $250B in Assets - CryptoRank
Coinbase is developing a post-quantum cryptography plan intended to protect Bitcoin custody for roughly $250 billion in assets under management. The initiative is described as a plan rather than a deployed system, with no confirmed technical specification or rollout timeline. The plan targets a long-horizon risk that Bitcoin's current public-key cryptography could eventually be broken by quantum computers, and it concerns custody infrastructure holding a very large pool of client assets. The roughly $250 billion figure refers to assets under management covered by the plan, according to the report; deployment details and timelines were not confirmed.
- 8.0
Bitcoin and Ethereum race quantum clock as U.S. funds $300M hardware push
The U.S. government is backing a $300 million quantum computing hardware initiative, pushing Bitcoin and Ethereum to accelerate their quantum-resistant cryptography roadmaps. The move heightens urgency around the possibility that sufficiently powerful quantum machines could break the keys securing these networks. Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on cryptographic assumptions that a large-scale quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could undermine, making this a systemic security issue for the entire crypto ecosystem. Government-funded hardware progress could shorten the timeline to that scenario, increasing pressure on networks to migrate before it arrives. Current quantum computers remain far from the scale needed to break RSA, elliptic curve, or discrete logarithm cryptography, but migration to post-quantum algorithms takes years because of coordination and legacy systems. NIST released its first finalized post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, and the industry is already debating how Bitcoin and Ethereum could adopt new signature schemes.