Galaxy Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for Quantum Computing Threat

Insider Brief

• Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative with up to $5 million in funding for quantum security research, developer grants, and an advisory council.
• The initiative aims to support efforts to evaluate and address potential quantum computing risks to Bitcoin’s cryptographic infrastructure.
• Galaxy’s program will focus on post-quantum cryptography research, migration tools, and collaboration with researchers and Bitcoin developers.
• Photo from Pexels by DS stories.

Galaxy Digital has launched the Galaxy Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative, committing up to $5 million toward developer grants, a dedicated research program, and a new advisory council focused on protecting Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundation from future quantum computing attacks.

The digital asset and data infrastructure company (Nasdaq: GLXY) announced the three-pillar initiative on Tuesday, framing it as a response to an accelerating warning cycle around quantum computing timelines and Bitcoin’s relatively slow engagement with post-quantum cryptography.

“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. “Galaxy’s role is to bridge that gap through research that makes the threat legible to investors and policymakers, as well as grants that fund the developers doing the hardest technical work.”

“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.

What the Initiative Covers

According to the company, the initiative operates across three areas. The first is a grant program funding work on quantum-resistant transaction proposals, post-quantum signature schemes, wallet and custodian migration tools, and security audits. Applications open immediately.

The second is an expanded research program through Galaxy Research, which will publish analysis of the quantum threat for institutional investors, policymakers, and the developer community. The third is a Quantum Advisory Council to guide grant decisions and research direction. Galaxy said the council’s initial 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.

Sanders said quantum timelines “continue to compress” and that Bitcoin should be no exception to the preparation underway across governments and industries.

Why Bitcoin Faces a Specific Problem

Bitcoin’s security rests on elliptic curve cryptography, specifically the secp256k1 curve. The mathematical problem that makes ECC secure (deriving a private key from a public key) is computationally infeasible for classical computers. On a quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm, that barrier collapses.

The urgency has increased. In March 2026, Google Quantum AI, the Ethereum Foundation, and Stanford University published a paper showing that breaking secp256k1 may require roughly an order of magnitude fewer quantum resources than previous estimates assumed. Under certain hardware conditions on a fast-clock superconducting architecture, a live Bitcoin transaction could be intercepted and the private key derived in approximately nine minutes, within Bitcoin’s ten-minute block confirmation window. These are theoretical estimates based on hardware that does not yet exist.

That specific attack vector (called an on-spend attack) is what makes Bitcoin’s exposure different from most encryption risk scenarios. When a transaction is broadcast to the network, the public key is briefly visible before the transaction settles. A sufficiently fast fault-tolerant quantum computer could derive the private key in that window and broadcast a competing transaction with a higher fee, effectively draining the wallet in real time. The attack does not require intercepting and storing data over years. It requires minutes of opportunity.

Even the risk is not evenly distributed. Approximately 6.9 million bitcoin (roughly one-third of circulating supply) sit in wallets where public keys have already been permanently exposed on-chain, according to the Google paper. This includes early Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) addresses and wallets that have previously spent funds. The 1.7 million bitcoin in early P2PK addresses (a category that includes holdings attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto) have had their public keys visible on the blockchain for over a decade. Unlike a financial institution that can rotate encryption keys, a public blockchain preserves every historical transaction permanently.

Industry Response Is Building

Galaxy’s initiative arrives alongside a broader wave of institutional engagement. BitGo recently launched quantum risk management capabilities for institutional Bitcoin wallets, including a Quantum Risk Score and updated UTXO selection controls designed to reduce address-key exposure. Blockstream identified post-quantum cryptography as a major engineering priority in its Q2 2026 report. Project Eleven placed Q-Day at a baseline scenario of 2033, with an optimistic bound of 2024 and a pessimistic bound of 2030.

On the protocol side, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 360 and 361 have outlined migration paths. BIP-360 proposes a new address type (Pay-to-Merkle-Root) that avoids exposing public keys on-chain. BIP-361, proposed in April 2026 by Jameson Lopp and five co-authors, outlines a three-phase migration plan that would ultimately freeze coins in wallets that fail to migrate. Both remain contested within the Bitcoin developer community. Any change to Bitcoin’s base protocol requires broad consensus among miners, node operators, and developers, a process that has taken years even for uncontroversial upgrades.

That governance reality is part of what Galaxy’s initiative is trying to address. The company said waiting until quantum computers become capable of attacking Bitcoin would leave insufficient time for the network to respond. No cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists today, but the company emphasized that preparation needs to begin well before the threat materializes.

On the government side, President Trump signed two executive orders on June 22, 2026, one focused on accelerating US quantum technology development and a companion order setting federal post-quantum cryptography deadlines of December 31, 2030 for key establishment, and December 31, 2031 for digital signatures.

For organizations managing Bitcoin holdings, TQI’s coverage of the quantum threat to cryptocurrency and post-quantum migration challenges covers the technical and operational implications in depth.