Galaxy Pledges $5M for Bitcoin Post-Quantum Migration

Galaxy Digital announced on July 21 a pledge of up to $5 million to support Bitcoin preparations for a future in which quantum computers could threaten current signature schemes. The program will fund grants, research and a Quantum Advisory Council focused on post-quantum signature review and migration tooling.

The funding is intended to back developer milestones, formal security audits and the creation of tools to help wallets, exchanges and custodians update software and move funds into protected outputs. Grants will target teams that review quantum-resistant transaction proposals, integrate post-quantum signature schemes into existing codebases, and build migration utilities for institutional and retail users.

Cryptographers say a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could recover a private key from an exposed elliptic-curve public key and forge signatures. Keys that are already visible on the blockchain present a long exposure window because they remain accessible indefinitely. Transactions also reveal public keys while they sit in the mempool before inclusion in a block, creating a shorter exposure window. Address reuse and extended public keys can increase the amount of vulnerable material on chain.

One draft proposal, BIP 360, would introduce a Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) output via a soft fork. P2MR would remove Taproot’s key path to keep public keys hidden until funds are spent, limiting long-term public-key exposure for outputs such as pay-to-public-key, bare multisignature and Taproot. The draft focuses on outputs that reveal keys for extended periods and does not by itself address mempool exposure.

A separate draft, BIP 361, outlines an operational transition tied to a future post-quantum signature design. The draft sketches a possible two-phase, roughly five-year migration after activation, but presents that timeline as an illustrative scenario rather than a planned schedule. After a design is chosen, the network would require proposal review, multiple code releases, audits, wallet updates, institutional upgrades and time for holders to move funds into protected outputs.

Broader cryptography work already uses multi-year timelines: in August 2024, standards bodies finalized post-quantum algorithms including those for digital signatures, and U.S. federal guidance directs certain government systems to adopt post-quantum signatures by Dec. 31, 2031. The Galaxy funding aims to move research into reviewed code and to produce migration tools, while network-wide adoption would depend on coordinated upgrades by developers, miners, node operators, wallet providers, exchanges, custodians and users.