About 6.04 million BTC face quantum exposure risk, 9 blockchain organizations form the Quantum Alliance

Odaily reports: Nine blockchain organizations announced on Thursday the formation of the Quantum Alliance, aimed at developing "quantum-ready" standards and establishing unified testing and validation methods for the quantum resilience of networks, wallets, and infrastructure.

The Quantum Alliance operates by reference to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), with founding participants spanning underlying protocols, privacy networks, Rollups, hardware wallets, and security auditing, including 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.

The Quantum Alliance stated that elliptic curve signatures leave approximately 6.04 million BTC, about 30% of the total supply, exposed to quantum risk. If a sufficiently capable quantum computer runs Shor's algorithm, it could theoretically reverse-engineer private keys and take control of the related assets.

Citing multiple forecasts, the Quantum Alliance said the relevant risk window may lie in the late 2020s, with one model marking March 2028 as an earlier window; a Google Quantum AI study lowered its estimate of the number of qubits needed to break Bitcoin's cryptography to fewer than 500,000. (Decrypt)