BlackRock: Fixing Bitcoin for Quantum Is Easier Than Breaking It
The world's biggest asset manager says post-quantum migration for crypto is a coordination problem, not a technical one, and defense still has the edge.
BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager with more than $15 trillion under management, has come down on the optimistic side of crypto's quantum panic. In a new report titled Quantum Computing and Blockchains, the firm argues that upgrading Bitcoin and other networks to quantum-resistant cryptography is a much smaller job than building a quantum computer capable of breaking them. The bottleneck is not the math. It is getting a decentralized network to agree on a fix and ship it.
"In our view, PQ migration for cryptocurrencies is eminently addressable from a technical standpoint, and the key challenge is one of timely coordination and implementation," the report reads. That lands in the middle of a long-running fear. Parts of the crypto community have warned for years that a future quantum computer could crack Bitcoin's cryptography, and some Bitcoin developers have already started testing quantum-resistant signatures on live sidechains. For now, the threat is theoretical. A machine that can break Bitcoin's signatures does not exist, and the quantum computers that do exist still make mistakes.
What's Actually Exposed
BlackRock puts hard numbers on the risk. About 35% of circulating Bitcoin is potentially vulnerable to certain attacks because its public keys are already exposed. Another 11% to 19% may be permanently lost no matter what anyone does, coins locked behind keys that are gone for good. Protecting the rest is technically simple, the report says. Coordinating that fix across Bitcoin's consensus-driven development is the hard part.
BlackRock's Skin in the Game
The firm is not a neutral observer. BlackRock launched spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in 2024, and its Bitcoin fund had the most successful launch in ETF history. CEO Larry Fink calls Bitcoin "digital gold" and an "international asset." A quantum break would torch that thesis.
On Thursday, BlackRock joined Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Block to announce a Bitcoin Security Consortium that will fund engineers working on open-source proposals like BIP-360, a design for quantum-resistant signatures. The report calls BIP-360 credible and well-designed but stops short of naming it the fix. It frames the contest as defense versus offense, and for now defense is ahead.
"It is a much less daunting task to upgrade current cryptographic systems to a quantum-secure standard than it is to build a CRQC from where quantum computing progress stands today," the report says, using shorthand for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. "Thus, advantage remains decidedly with the defense, at the current juncture." The word doing the work there is "current."
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