Nine crypto firms form a Quantum Alliance and warn that 6 million bitcoin, 30% of all coins, already sit on exposed keys

The crypto industry now has a body whose only purpose is to decide what "quantum-safe" actually means. The Quantum Alliance, announced in Lisbon on Friday, brings together nine organisations: Quantus, American Fortress, Intmax, hardware wallet maker Keystone, the Midnight Foundation, Postquant Labs, Abelian, The Vault and Hacken. It describes itself as an open standards body that will set criteria for judging quantum-resistance claims and compatibility standards between networks.

The headline number is the exposure estimate. The alliance counts 6.04 million bitcoin, 30.2% of supply, as quantum-exposed at rest, meaning the public keys that protect them are already on the chain where a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could one day derive the private keys. CoinDesk, which reported the figure as 6.4 million, stressed that no quantum machine capable of that exists today. About 1.1 million of those coins are attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The alliance's first deliverable is a public definition of quantum readiness covering transaction signatures, key management, consensus, zero-knowledge proof systems and peer-to-peer connections. It will publish open test criteria and benchmarks any team can run, plus migration reference designs for exposed keys, dormant accounts and larger post-quantum transactions, across four working groups. It sets no dates.

What to do about dormant, exposed coins remains contested. Richard Carback, Postquant Labs' chief technology officer, told CoinDesk he sees 2028 as a realistic date for a machine that breaks today's cryptography and would rather move vulnerable coins into a recoverable trust than freeze them. "Freezing coins is a governance decision for the Bitcoin network, not for the industry," said Bryn Bennett of The Vault.