Bitcoin Magazine
BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development
Nine of the largest names in institutional Bitcoin launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium on Thursday, a group backed by $15 million in member pledges over three years to fund work on the network’s long-term security, including preparation for a future era of quantum computing.
Founding members are Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, and Strategy, a lineup that spans holders, custodians, exchanges, infrastructure and payments providers, and asset managers.
The consortium’s day-to-day work falls to Mike Schmidt, executive director of the developer non-profit Brink, who serves in a volunteer role.
Schmidt tweeted about the role, saying, “I said yes because supporting Bitcoin’s developers and helping people understand their work are the two things I’ve spent my time in Bitcoin on, through Brink and Optech. This group wants to do both: fund the people already securing Bitcoin, and bring accurate information about that work to audiences it doesn’t currently reach.”
Each member directs its own funding to the developers, researchers, and organizations it chooses; the $15 million figure is an aggregate of independent pledges rather than a pooled fund. The group also plans to serve as a reference point on Bitcoin’s security for investors, the public, and the media, and to publish material it will update as the field develops.
The consortium drew clear limits around its role. It says it does not develop or direct Bitcoin’s protocol, takes no position on specific protocol changes, and does not speak for Bitcoin or its developers.
It casts itself on the model of industry groups that fund the open-source software they rely on without controlling the work.
“Bitcoin’s development is, and will remain, the work of a global, decentralized community of contributors,” the group said.
“As long-term holders, we have every incentive to see Bitcoin remain secure for generations,” said Phong Le, Chief Executive Officer of Strategy. “Funding the people who do this work, and helping inform the conversation around it, is a natural way for us to contribute.”
Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s Global Head of Digital Assets, said Bitcoin Core developers “do incredibly important work,” and that the members would make “significant additional funding available to support Bitcoin’s long-term security needs.”
Brink, the non-profit coordinating the effort, has funded open-source Bitcoin work since 2020, including more than $1 million to developers in a single year and the first third-party security audit of Bitcoin Core. Schmidt co-founded the group with developer John Newbery.
Much of the consortium’s stated focus lands on the quantum question. Large-scale quantum computers able to break BTC’s cryptography do not exist today, and credible estimates place such capability years out.
The group frames post-quantum protection as a long-term priority the technical community already works on, and positions itself as a grounded source as that work moves.
That framing matches a wider institutional turn toward the issue. Coinbase has formed a quantum computing advisory board, Galaxy launched its own quantum readiness initiative with developer grants days before, and BlackRock has listed quantum computing as a risk in its spot BTC ETF filings.
Developers, for their part, have proposed migration plans built on schemes such as BIP-360 that would move coins to quantum-resistant addresses, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned the timeline is compressing.
Views on urgency diverge, a split the consortium’s members embody. Adam Back, founder of member firm Blockstream, has called the quantum threat decades away, while other voices place a capable machine within the next several years.
The stakes are large either way, since Coinbase research has estimated that between 20% and 50% of BTC’s supply, much of it in older wallet formats, could face exposure to a long-range quantum attack.
The consortium sidesteps the timeline debate and stakes its role on funding and information rather than a forecast. Its own summary holds that the risk is real, yet the network is preparing.
This post BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
Bitcoin Magazine
Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat
Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative today, a program that commits up to $5 million in developer grants, a research effort, and a new advisory council to harden the network against the arrival of powerful quantum computers.
The Nasdaq-listed firm framed the multi-pillar effort as an attempt to close a gap between two worlds moving at different speeds.
“There’s a gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and the Bitcoin development world, which is just beginning to engage with post-quantum cryptography in earnest,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy, whose team has tracked the threat for Wall Street and cast it as a long-term engineering problem rather than a crisis.
Bitcoin’s security rests on elliptic curve cryptography, a scheme that a machine running Shor’s algorithm could break by deriving a private key from an exposed public key.
An attacker with such a tool could forge a signature and drain a wallet, with nothing on-chain to flag the theft. No such computer exists today, yet the estimated timeline for one keeps compressing, a trend the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned narrows the window for the network to upgrade.
The grant program forms the first pillar. Galaxy said it would fund work on quantum-resistant transaction proposals, the integration of post-quantum signature schemes, tooling for wallet and custodian migration, and formal security audits of proposed code.
Grants will be judged one at a time and paid on a milestone basis, and the firm expects to open applications without delay through the address quantum@galaxy.com.
A research and publishing arm forms the second pillar, with Galaxy Research set to publish analysis of the threat and the developer response for investors, policymakers, and the technical community.
The third pillar is a Quantum Advisory Council that will guide the research and weigh grant proposals. Its first members are Barry Sanders, professor and scientific director of Quantum City at the University of Calgary; Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss Fellow; and Eran Tromer, a professor of computer science at Boston University.
“As leaders in the digital assets space, we believe it’s important that we help be part of the solution to any potential threat quantum computing poses to Bitcoin,” said Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy, a figure known for bold price calls on bitcoin. Sanders said quantum timelines “continue to compress” and that bitcoin should be no exception to the preparation underway across governments and industries.
Old and reused addresses face the sharpest risk, since their public keys sit exposed on the ledger. An estimated 1.7 million BTC rest in legacy pay-to-public-key addresses, a stash with keys on permanent display.
Defenses under review center on migration to quantum-resistant address types and new signature schemes, an approach embodied in BIP-360, a proposal from developer Hunter Beast that removes public-key exposure from standard transactions.
That proposal merged into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository this year, and BTQ Technologies deployed a working implementation on a quantum testnet.
Bitcoin’s decentralized governance turns such changes into a slow process of design, review, testing, and deployment that can span years. Some observers cast that structure as the true obstacle, a governance challenge as much as a cryptographic one, and the pool of developers on the problem stays small next to its scale.
The launch lands in an active warning cycle. Galaxy Research has held that the risk is real yet the countermeasures are advancing, and President Trump signed executive orders that advance U.S. quantum work and set a 2031 federal deadline for post-quantum defense. NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024.
Galaxy said it welcomes co-funders and other stakeholders, and acknowledged that peers may pledge their own funds toward the same goal. The firm cast that prospect as a benefit rather than a rivalry, with an open invitation to institutions and developers who want to join.
This post Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
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