Bitcoin and Ethereum are accelerating their post-quantum security efforts to address the threat that future quantum computing technology could pose to the cryptographic systems of cryptocurrency wallets. At the same time, the U.S. government has also begun promoting the development of quantum computing hardware and related technologies through large-scale financial investment.
The U.S. Department of Commerce completed the CHIPS Act award program on Tuesday, providing up to $100 million each to Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum, and acquiring minority stakes in the three quantum computing companies. The related funds will mainly be used to expand hardware, manufacturing capabilities and error-correction systems, providing support for the development of larger-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers in the future.
In the blockchain sector, the Ethereum protocol team has set December 2029 as a self-imposed key deadline, hoping to achieve quantum resistance at the Ethereum base layer in areas including execution, consensus and data before this deadline. The roadmap is based on the assumption that “Q-Day” could arrive as early as 2030.
By comparison, Bitcoin currently has no similar unified network-wide deadline. However, work related to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-360 has accelerated significantly this year. The proposal plans to introduce a post-quantum output type. At the same time, BIP-361 is also advancing, with its core plan being to establish a phased migration mechanism and gradually phase out the existing ECDSA and Schnorr signature schemes.
At the same time, Bitcoin researchers and related institutions are also continuing to discuss the 2029 time window, believing that a credible and executable cryptographic migration path needs to be established by then.
It should be noted that the relevant timelines do not mean that the market expects a quantum computer capable of directly stealing Bitcoin or Ethereum assets to necessarily appear in 2029.
Google Quantum AI previously estimated earlier this year that an attack against 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography might require fewer than 1,200 error-corrected qubits. A qubit is the basic unit of information in quantum computing.
Meanwhile, IBM still plans to launch a fault-tolerant quantum computer called Starling in 2029, with the system targeting the operation of 100 million quantum gates on 200 logical qubits. Quantinuum plans to achieve hundreds of logical qubits during the same period.
Although these quantum computing capability metrics cannot be directly matched one-to-one with Google's attack estimate, the continued development of hardware explains why blockchain protocol developers are unwilling to wait until quantum computers with cryptographic attack capabilities actually emerge before taking action.
For Bitcoin, post-quantum migration presents more complex challenges. There are currently millions of Bitcoin stored in addresses whose public keys have already been exposed, including 1 million Bitcoin estimated to belong to Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
BIP-361 proposes eventually restricting traditional signature methods after the migration phase is completed. This means that if the relevant holders fail to migrate their assets within the prescribed migration period, their Bitcoin could potentially become unusable in the future.
Ethereum faces another type of coordination challenge. The Ethereum Foundation has established a dedicated post-quantum team and set clear goals, but moving from completing an upgrade at the base layer to encouraging wallets, applications and ordinary users to fully switch to new signature schemes may still take longer.
Therefore, the key to the current competition is not which side between quantum computers and cryptocurrencies will “win” first, but whether Bitcoin and Ethereum can replace their existing cryptographic systems before quantum hardware engineering continues to narrow the technological gap. After all, these cryptographic mechanisms are currently protecting on-chain assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars.