Coinbase’s Quantum Council to Crypto: Start Preparing Now, Don’t Wait for Consensus

Coinbase’s Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain urged the crypto industry on June 11 to begin migrating Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other networks to quantum-safe cryptography immediately, arguing that uncertain timelines are no reason to delay the work.

The council, an independent body Coinbase established in January, released a report warning that the technical migration to post-quantum security will take years of coordination across decentralised networks and should not wait for consensus on the industry’s hardest open questions. 

No quantum computer can break blockchain cryptography right now. The crypto community needs to start preparing now rather than debating exactly when the threat will arrive.

Coinbase’s Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain

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Millions of Coins at Risk

The board estimated that roughly 7 million Bitcoins sit in addresses with exposed public keys or reused addresses, the category most vulnerable to a future quantum attack. Many of those coins are believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto or to wallets whose owners long ago lost their keys.

Research cited by the council warned that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer capable of cracking elliptic-curve signatures is likely to arrive by 2030 or earlier, though no firm date exists. The board’s members are drawn from Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Bar-Ilan University, the Ethereum Foundation, Eigen Labs, and UC Santa Barbara, where professor and ACM Fellow Dahlia Malkhi co-authored the paper.

The report laid out three competing approaches: freezing or burning vulnerable coins after a deadline, doing nothing and leaving the choice to users, or middle-ground measures such as limiting how many vulnerable coins can move per block or accepting special cryptographic proofs in place of legacy signatures.

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