Here's why the quantum threat for bitcoin may be smaller than people fear

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Here's why the quantum threat for bitcoin may be smaller than people fear

The key point is that most of the potentially exposed bitcoin isn’t sitting in a handful of giant, juicy targets. It’s scattered across more than 32,000 separate wallets.

By Shaurya Malwa

Updated Feb 9, 2026, 7:00 a.m. Published Feb 9, 2026, 6:29 a.m.

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What to know:

• A new CoinShares report argues that fears of an imminent quantum computing threat to bitcoin are overstated, with only a small portion of supply realistically at risk in a way that could move markets.
• The firm estimates that while about 1.6 million BTC, or roughly 8% of supply, sits in older P2PK addresses, only around 10,200 BTC is concentrated enough that its theft could cause appreciable market disruption.
• CoinShares says breaking bitcoin’s cryptography would require fault-tolerant quantum computers about 100,000 times more powerful than today’s, framing quantum risk as a long-term engineering challenge to be addressed via gradual adoption of post-quantum signatures rather than an immediate crisis.

A new report from digital asset manager CoinShares is pushing back on the growing narrative that bitcoin faces an imminent quantum computing crisis, arguing that only a small sliver of supply is realistically at risk in a way that could move markets.

CoinShares is fourth-largest manager of digital asset exchange-traded products globally behind BlackRock, Grayscale, and Fidelity and has a self-reported 34% market share of EMEA. It had over $10 billion in assets under management as of September 2025.

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The Saturday report challenged widely cited estimates suggesting that as much as 20% to 50% of all bitcoin could eventually be vulnerable to quantum-enabled key extraction. Those figures, CoinShares said, blur the line between theoretical exposure and coins that could actually be compromised at scale.

CoinShares narrowed its focus to legacy Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) addresses, where public keys are permanently visible on-chain and therefore easier targets if quantum computers become capable of reversing them.

The firm estimates about 1.6 million BTC — or roughly 8% of total supply — sits in these older address types.

But CoinShares argued the number of coins large enough to create “appreciable market disruption” if stolen is far smaller: about 10,200 BTC. The remainder, it said, is distributed across more than 32,000 UTXOs averaging around 50 BTC each, making them far less attractive and far more time-consuming to crack even under optimistic assumptions.

(CoinShares)

The key point is that most of the potentially exposed bitcoin isn’t sitting in a handful of giant, juicy targets. It’s scattered across more than 32,000 separate chunks of coins, and each chunk averages about 50 BTC.

A quantum attacker would have to crack those chunks one by one to steal them, instead of breaking into a single address and walking away with a market-moving haul. That makes the job slower, noisier and less profitable, even if one assumes the attacker has unusually strong quantum hardware.

CoinShares said breaking bitcoin’s cryptography would require fault-tolerant quantum systems roughly 100,000 times more powerful than the largest machines today, placing the threat at least a decade away. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet, quoted in the report, noted that Google’s Willow is a 105-qubit machine, while key-breaking would require millions of qubits.

Instead, the firm endorsed a gradual transition to post-quantum signatures, framing quantum risk not as an emergency, but as a foreseeable engineering problem bitcoin can absorb over time.

Quantum fears aren’t new for bitcoin, but they’ve been creeping back into market conversations as prices wobble and investors look for structural risks to blame.

In December, CoinDesk reported that most bitcoin developers view quantum computing as a distant, non-issue, arguing machines capable of cracking bitcoin’s cryptography are unlikely to exist for decades.

Critics counter that the real problem is not the timeline, but the lack of visible preparation, especially as governments and major tech firms begin rolling out quantum-resistant systems.

Proposals such as BIP-360 aim to introduce new wallet formats that could allow users to migrate gradually, but the debate has highlighted a growing gap between developers and increasingly institutional capital that wants a clearer long-term plan.