Quantum Computing Threat ‘Mostly a Coordination Issue’ for Bitcoin: Fireblocks CEO

The threat posed by quantum computing to the cryptographic signature systems used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is “not really a threat in the way people make it out to be,” said Michael Shaulov, CEO of crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks.

Speaking at the Financial times At the Digital Asset Summit, Shaulov argued that “the entire internet industry actually needs to take a leap of faith and start using post-quantum encryption,” adding that “generally speaking, we have the available algorithms.”

He described the migration to post-quantum cryptographic signature schemes before “Q-Day” as “mainly a coordination problem” for Bitcoin. This means developers and the community must agree on a plan and then put in place all the moving pieces to make it happen before the quantum threat becomes a reality.

“It’s not a technical challenge,” Shaulov said, noting that changing signature schemes is something Bitcoin has done “once or twice in its life.”

Shaulov’s comments come as researchers have accelerated the timescale for Q-Day, the emergence of a quantum computer powerful enough to break modern cryptography. A recent report from quantum security firm Project Eleven argued that Q-Day could arrive as early as 2030, pushing back the timeline proposed by Google researchers by two years.

Last month, the company awarded 1 BTC to a researcher for deploying a publicly accessible quantum computer to crack a 15-bit elliptic curve key using a variant of Shor’s algorithm. While far from the complexity of Bitcoin’s 256-bit keys, it marks the latest advance in quantum attacks on cryptography.

North Korea and privacy threats

Instead of quantum attacks, what “keeps us up at night” at Fireblocks is the looming threat of North Korean hackers, Shaulov said.

He argued that attacks by state-sponsored hackers such as the Lazarus Group, such as the recent $292 million Kelp DAO exploit, have a greater impact than crypto’s price volatility in suppressing institutional adoption. Shaulov noted that when billions of dollars of crypto “evaporate from an exchange, that is something that people become very afraid of.”

Another factor holding crypto back is privacy, he argued. “Once you move into the right enterprise or capital markets use cases, privacy is a thing,” Shaulov said.

Citing the example of Walmart, which last year launched trading in Bitcoin and Ethereum through its OnePay app, he noted that every crypto payment accepted by the company would be publicly visible on a blockchain explorer, allowing outside observers to “see how much they are collecting and what their revenue will be – and that is a general problem for them as a publicly traded company.”

While he admitted that crypto payments business is “not big enough for this to be a big deal in the real world” right now, he added that “in our conversations with virtually every Fortune 500 [company],” crypto privacy “is actually the most important and unresolved issue for them to move forward with the project in a meaningful way.”