Galaxy Digital (GLXY) said it set up a $5 million fund for Bitcoin developers working to protect the network from the potential future threat posed by quantum computing.
The crypto financial services company said it will begin accepting applications for the Galaxy Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative immediately, with grants focusing on developing quantum-resistant signature schemes, wallet migration tools and security audits. The company said it hopes other firms will contribute funding and research to accelerate the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography.
Bitcoin secures wallets and transactions with cryptographic techniques that current computers cannot break in a meaningful timeframe. While quantum computing is still too immature to attack the blockchain, advances in the technology have accelerated efforts across government and industry to adopt quantum-resistant standards before the threat becomes a reality.
In the event that quantum computers do become capable of breaking Bitcoin’s cryptography, roughly 6.9 million bitcoin could become vulnerable to theft, according to CryptoQuant research. At today’s price of about $66,800, that comes to about $461 billion.
While researchers agree the threat is not imminent, many argue preparations should begin now because agreeing on and deploying protocol upgrades could take years. Proposals to migrate Bitcoin to post-quantum cryptography are expected to be significantly more complex than previous upgrades such as Taproot, requiring coordination across developers, wallets, exchanges and users.
President Donald Trump recently signed two executive orders directing the U.S. to build a large-scale quantum computer and to defend federal systems against one. The U.S. Commerce Department signed letters of intent to award more than $2 billion to nine quantum computing companies building machines capable of breaking the cryptography defending Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the cryptography that the internet runs on.