Coinbase's Quantum Council: 7M $BTC Are Sitting Ducks — But Don't Touch Satoshi's Stack 🦆

Coinbase's Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain is urging developers to begin technical work on upgrading Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major networks for a post-quantum future, arguing that the engineering should not wait for the industry to settle its political fight over what to do with vulnerable or abandoned coins. The council, launched in January and made up of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Ethereum Foundation, Eigen Labs, Bar-Ilan University and UC Santa Barbara, released its findings Thursday. "No quantum computer can break blockchain cryptography right now," the council wrote. "But timelines are uncertain, and the crypto community needs to start preparing now rather than debating exactly when the threat will arrive."

The report frames the threat as more probable than previously assumed. According to the advisory council, a "cryptographically relevant quantum computer" capable of cracking the elliptic curve digital signatures that protect Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major blockchains is more likely than not to exist as early as 2030. The council warned that millions of Bitcoin are held in legacy addresses where public keys are already exposed, making them directly vulnerable. "Many of these are believed to be Satoshi's coins or funds whose owners have long since lost their keys," the report stated, adding that, when address reuse across other formats is included, "approximately 7 million Bitcoin total are currently considered quantum-vulnerable."

The council laid out three options for coins that never migrate to quantum-safe addresses. The first would permanently freeze or burn them after a deadline. The second would do nothing and leave the decision to users, which the council noted "overrides property rights and sets a precedent for network-level interference that conflicts with Bitcoin's core principles." A third middle-ground path would cap how many vulnerable coins can move per block, accept special cryptographic proofs in place of legacy signatures, and let users "pre-commit to migrations without publicly moving funds yet." The group stressed the proposals are not mutually exclusive. "We stress that the above proposals are compatible with each other; there is no reason to not adopt more than one or all of them, since each has its own advantages," the council wrote.

The recommendations land as the wider ecosystem accelerates its own planning. In January, the Ethereum Foundation formed a team to coordinate Ethereum's transition to post-quantum security and has explored replacing validator and wallet signatures with quantum-resistant alternatives. That work was followed in February by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mapping out a quantum upgrade roadmap. Coinbase's advisory board framed its report as a way to keep the engineering conversation ahead of the political one, leaving the question of what to do with unmigrated coins for a later stage of the debate.