Approximately 6.04 million Bitcoins face quantum exposure risk, 9 blockchain organizations establish Quantum Alliance

Odaily Planet Daily reports that 9 blockchain organizations announced on Thursday the establishment of Quantum Alliance, aimed at developing 'quantum-ready' standards and creating unified testing and verification methods for quantum resistance in networks, wallets, and infrastructure. Quantum Alliance operates in reference to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), with founding participants spanning areas such as underlying protocols, privacy networks, rollups, hardware wallets, and security auditing. These include Quantus, Postquant Labs, Midnight Foundation, Keystone, Abelian, and Hacken. Its work is divided into four groups: blockchain migration, post-quantum zero-knowledge systems, wallet security, and cross-chain compatibility. Quantum Alliance stated that elliptic curve signatures expose approximately 6.04 million Bitcoins—around 30% of the total supply—to quantum risks. If a sufficiently capable quantum computer were to run Shor's algorithm, it could theoretically reverse-engineer private keys and gain control of the associated assets. Quantum Alliance cited multiple predictions indicating that the risk window might emerge in the late 2020s, with one model marking March 2028 as an earlier window. A study by Google Quantum AI estimated the number of qubits required to break Bitcoin cryptography to be less than 500,000. (Decrypt)