Galaxy Digital is putting up to $5 million toward getting Bitcoin ready for Q-Day

[Annie]

Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative this week, pledging up to $5 million in developer grants for post-quantum cryptographic solutions, a dedicated research program through Galaxy Research, and a new Quantum Advisory Council bringing in outside academic experts, including University of Calgary professor Barry Sanders, MIT Sea Grant fellow Damien Bérubé, and Boston University computer scientist Eran Tromer. The firm says it will begin accepting grant applications immediately

Founder and CEO Mike Novogratz framed the effort around industry responsibility, saying that as leaders in digital assets, Galaxy believes it should help be part of the solution to any potential quantum threat to Bitcoin. The initiative targets Q-Day directly, the point at which a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to run Shor's algorithm against Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography, letting an attacker derive a private key from an already exposed public key, forge a valid signature, and drain a wallet with nothing on-chain flagging the transaction as fraudulent. Old and reused addresses carry the most exposure, since their public keys are already sitting visible on the blockchain

The launch lands in the middle of a genuinely accelerating warning cycle rather than a one-off announcement. Quantum security firm Project Eleven concluded in a May report that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is more likely than not to exist by 2033, potentially as early as 2030, estimating roughly 6.9 million Bitcoin currently sit in quantum-exposed addresses. Coinbase's own quantum advisory council urged developers in June to start migration work now rather than debate the exact timing, pegging the vulnerable supply at around 7 million BTC, and that same month President Trump signed two executive orders advancing US quantum capabilities and moving the federal government's own post-quantum cryptography deadline up to December 2031. Project Eleven separately unveiled a technique on July 16 letting users prove wallet ownership after Q-Day through parent key derivation rather than a signature, giving people a fallback path even once the standard cryptographic protection is gone

Galaxy Research head Alex Thorn described the underlying problem plainly, there's a real gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and Bitcoin's own development community, which is only just beginning to seriously engage with post-quantum cryptography. Actual fixes, migrating funds to quantum-resistant addresses and adopting new signature schemes through proposals like BIP-360 and BIP-361, could still take years given how Bitcoin's decentralized governance actually works, which is exactly why Galaxy is framing this as groundwork that needs to start now rather than close to whatever year Q-Day actually arrives

Galaxy Commits Up to $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for Quantum Threat - Decryptdecrypt.co

[Connor82]

6.9 to 7 million BTC sitting in quantum exposed addresses is a genuinely enormous number once you actually convert that to dollar value, that's not a niche edge case, that's a meaningful chunk of total circulating supply