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

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In brief - Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov argued that migrating to post-quantum signature schemes is “mostly a coordination issue" for Bitcoin, rather than a technical challenge. - Shaulov flagged North Korean hacking attacks as a roadblock to institutional adoption of crypto. - Crypto privacy is "the most important and unresolved issue" for Fortune 500 companies seeking to adopt crypto, he said. The threat posed by quantum computing to the cryptographic signature schemes employed by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is “not actually a threat as people make it out to be,” according to Michael Shaulov, CEO of crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks. Speaking at the Financial Times Digital Asset Summit, Shaulov argued that “the entire internet industry needs to basically leapfrog and start using post-quantum encryption,” adding that, “generally speaking, we have the available algorithms.” He framed migrating to post-quantum cryptographic signature schemes before "Q-Day" as “mostly a coordination issue” for Bitcoin—meaning developers and the community need to agree on a plan and then execute all the moving pieces to make it happen before the quantum threat becomes reality. “It’s not a technical challenge,” Shaulov said, noting that changing signature schemes is something that Bitcoin has already done “once or twice through its lifetime.” 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 by quantum security firm Project Eleven argued that Q-Day could arrive as soon as 2030, bringing forward the timeline proposed by Google researchers by two years. Last month, the firm 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. Although far from the complexity of Bitcoin’s 256-bit keys, it marks the latest advance in the field of quantum attacks on cryptography. North Korea and privacy threats Instead of quantum attacks, what “keeps us awake at night” at Fireblocks is the looming threat of North Korean hackers, Shaulov said. He argued that attacks by state-sponsored hackers like Lazarus Group, such as the recent $292 million Kelp DAO exploit, are more impactful than crypto’s price volatility in stifling institutional adoption. Shaulov noted that when billions of dollars worth of crypto “evaporates from an exchange, that’s something that people get very scared of.” Another factor holding crypto back is privacy, he argued. “Once you move into proper corporate or capital market use cases, privacy is a thing,” Shaulov said. Pointing to the example of Walmart, which launched Bitcoin and Ethereum trading through its OnePay app last year, he noted that any crypto payment accepted by the firm would be publicly viewable on a blockchain explorer, enabling outside observers to “see how much they're collecting and what is going to be their revenue—and that’s a general problem for them as a public company.” While conceding that crypto payment activity is “not big enough for this to be a huge concern” in the real world at this point, he added that, “in our conversations with pretty much every Fortune 500 [company],” crypto privacy is “basically the most important and unresolved issue for them to move forward in a meaningful way with the project.”

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