Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has urged the Bitcoin community to accelerate its efforts to guard against quantum attacks, arguing that a major breakthrough in quantum computing could come much sooner than expected.
“I feel 50/50 within 5 years, there is a quantum breakthrough,” Yakovenko said at the All-In Summit 2025, which was published to YouTube on Friday. “We should migrate Bitcoin to a quantum-resistant signature scheme,” he added.
Yakovenko based his prediction on the fact that with so many technologies converging, and how fast AI is accelerating from a research paper to an implementation. “It is astounding,” he said. “I would try to encourage folks to speed things up,” he added.
Cybersecurity experts say the threat may emerge quicker
It is commonly forecasted that quantum computers will eventually be able to crack present-day encryption, making security a concern for users in the blockchain industry. Though many Bitcoin (BTC) advocates still think the threat is a long way off.
Bitcoin wallets are secured by ECDSA to generate a pair of private-public keys.
Its security relies on the hard-to-solve elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), which is impossible to resolve with classical computers, but may not be for quantum computers.
David Carvalho, founder and chief scientist of Naoris Protocol, recently said in June that quantum computers have become so advanced that they could “plausibly rip” through Bitcoin’s cryptography within even less than five years’ time.
However, upgrading a blockchain from legacy cryptography to post-quantum security would be challenging because it would require a hard fork, something many crypto communities are against.
Bitcoiners aren’t as concerned about the threat
Other Bitcoiners don’t see the threat as imminent.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back said that current quantum computers do not pose a credible threat to Bitcoin’s cryptography but will likely threaten it in the future.
Back estimated that quantum computers may evolve to that extent in “maybe 20 years.”
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Meanwhile, Jan3 founder Samson Mow told Magazine in June that he isn’t too worried about the threat quantum computing poses.
“I think it is a real risk, but the timeline is probably still a decade away, and I would say everything else will fail before Bitcoin fails,” Mow says.
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