The Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative, announced by the digital asset firm, opens grant applications immediately. Funded work will focus on quantum-resistant transaction proposals, integration of post-quantum signature schemes, wallet migration tooling, and formal security audits. The program also includes an ongoing threat research component through Galaxy Research and a newly formed Quantum Advisory Council drawn from academic cryptography and quantum computing. Inaugural council members are Barry Sanders of the University of Calgary, Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss Fellow, and Eran Tromer of Boston University.

Galaxy is also soliciting co-funding from other industry firms to expand the effort's scale.

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The Threat Is Getting More Concrete

Bitcoin's transaction authorization relies on a cryptographic system called ECDSA. Any address that has ever sent a transaction has its public key visible on-chain, and a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running an algorithm called Shor's could theoretically derive the private key from that public key, allowing silent theft of funds. Addresses that have only ever received bitcoin and never spent it keep their public keys hidden, which offers some protection.

The scale of exposure is significant. According to research firm Project Eleven, roughly 6.9 million BTC, representing approximately 32 to 34 percent of the circulating supply, sits in addresses with exposed public keys. At current prices, that figure represents somewhere between $461 billion and $560 billion. Address reuse accounts for the largest share of the vulnerable pool, at around 4.99 million BTC, followed by legacy Pay-to-Public-Key outputs at 1.72 million BTC.

No quantum computer today comes close to posing this threat. Google's most advanced chip, Willow, operates at roughly 105 qubits. Earlier estimates from 2019 put the qubit count needed to break Bitcoin's cryptography at 10 to 20 million physical qubits. But three research papers published in early 2026 sharply revised that figure. Google's March 2026 research suggested fewer than 500,000 physical qubits may be sufficient, a reduction of roughly 20 times. Separate work from Caltech, Oratomic, and UC Berkeley proposed that as few as 10,000 to 26,000 specialized logical qubits could do the job under certain assumptions, according to the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Separate analysis from KuCoin and Spark puts the logical qubit requirement considerably lower, at 1,200 to 2,330 stable logical qubits, reflecting different methodological assumptions. Researchers and editors have flagged the two ranges as reflecting distinct research approaches, and the question of which figure better characterizes near-term risk remains under active discussion.

In March 2026, DARPA stated that it now considers it more likely than not that a utility-scale quantum computer will exist by 2033. Project Eleven, which focuses specifically on Bitcoin security, independently estimates that Q-Day could arrive between 2030 and 2033. The threat has also moved beyond simulation. In April 2026, a researcher broke a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptography key on actual quantum hardware and claimed a 1 BTC bounty for the largest publicly recorded quantum attack on elliptic curve cryptography, a documented real-world milestone that illustrates the direction of travel even if full-scale attacks remain distant. The policy environment has also shifted: in August 2024, NIST finalized three post-quantum cryptographic standards, marking the first time governments have formally codified defenses against the quantum threat.

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Galaxy's Position Has Shifted

Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz said in February 2026 that quantum computing was "the big excuse" behind some investor concerns and was "not a huge issue for crypto" in the long run. The firm's posture has since changed.

"As leaders in the digital assets space, we believe it's important that we help be part of the solution to any potential threat quantum computing poses to Bitcoin," Novogratz said in the initiative announcement.

Galaxy's Head of Firmwide Research, Alex Thorn, framed the program around a gap between two worlds moving at different speeds. "There's a gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and the Bitcoin development world," Thorn said. In a separate statement, Thorn described the firm's intended role: "Galaxy's role is to bridge that gap through research that makes the threat legible to investors and policymakers, as well as grants that fund the developers doing the hardest technical work."

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Protocol Work Is Already Underway

Two Bitcoin Improvement Proposals are already in motion. BIP-360, merged into the official BIP repository on February 11, 2026, introduces a quantum-resistant address type that keeps public keys off-chain at the time of creation. A testnet built by BTQ Technologies has processed more than 100,000 blocks with more than 50 miners and over 100 open-source contributors. BIP-361 proposes a migration roadmap that includes migration mechanisms, timelines, and enforcement procedures.

Its more contentious provision would effectively freeze coins in wallets that remain unresponsive during the migration window, a category that could include Satoshi Nakamoto's holdings.

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Stakes Are Higher Outside the US

The initiative carries particular weight in regions where Bitcoin adoption is high but infrastructure to support a technical migration is thin. India ranks first on Chainalysis's 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, with an estimated 60 million users on WazirX and CoinDCX alone. Pakistan ranks third, with strong P2P trading volumes.

Long-hold behavior common in both markets raises the probability that users hold coins in the legacy address formats that make up approximately 97 percent of quantum-vulnerable BTC, according to Project Eleven, which attributes 72.3 percent to address reuse and 24.8 percent to legacy Pay-to-Public-Key formats.

In Nigeria, where 89 percent of crypto purchases are Bitcoin and 30 million users hold Binance Wallet accounts, self-custody rates are high due to repeated exchange account freezes and withdrawal delays.

Self-custody protects against exchange failure but places full responsibility on the individual to execute a migration when the time comes. A poorly designed migration tool, or no tool at all, could leave a large share of funds in vulnerable formats. No major African quantum computing research centers are currently included in the initiative's advisory council.

Galaxy's grant program accepts applications now. Developers working on wallet tooling optimized for mobile-first or low-bandwidth environments represent a key area of need for Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, and the program may particularly suit teams already building for these contexts.