Nine Financial and Crypto Firms Form a Bitcoin Security Consortium to Fund Quantum-Resistance Work

Nine firms announced on July 23 the formation of a Bitcoin Security Consortium, pledging a combined 15 million dollars over three years to fund the developers and researchers who maintain and strengthen the security of Bitcoin. The founding members are BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy, Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, Block, Blockstream, Fidelity Digital Assets and Galaxy Digital.

The money will not be pooled or centrally allocated. Each member independently chooses which developers or organizations to fund, with day-to-day coordination handled on a volunteer basis by Mike Schmidt, executive director of the open-source funding nonprofit Brink. Galaxy Digital separately committed up to 5 million dollars in grants for work on quantum resistance.

The organizing concern is the eventual arrival of quantum computers capable of deriving a private key from a public key, which would expose coins held at addresses whose public keys are already visible on the ledger. Coinbase says it is building a post-quantum custody system and does not consider the threat imminent, while BlackRock has formally listed quantum computing as a risk factor in its spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund filings and argues the network can migrate in time if it acts early.

The first-principles problem is that any fix requires a consensus change across a deliberately slow-moving network, and roughly 460 billion dollars of Bitcoin sits at addresses with exposed public keys, including early pay-to-public-key coins and long-dormant balances whose owners may never sign a migration transaction.