New research by CoinShares says that Bitcoin’s vulnerability to quantum computers has been overstated. The digital asset manager claims that while present-day quantum systems are far too weak to threaten Bitcoin’s underlying cryptography, the blockchain is theoretically at risk to future advances in the technology.
The report highlighted that only 8% of the total BTC supply held in legacy addresses poses a genuine quantum risk that could cause meaningful market disruption.
CoinShares Calls Quantum Threat Overstated, Warns 10,200 BTC at Risk
The report authored by CoinShares’ Bitcoin Research Lead, Christopher Bendiksen, directly contradicts a widely referenced May 2025 research from Chaincode Labs, which estimated that between 20% to 50% of circulating coins are vulnerable to quantum-enabled key extraction. Bendiksen said these figures combine exposure categories with vastly different practical implications.
“Bitcoin’s quantum vulnerability is not an immediate crisis but a foreseeable engineering consideration, with ample time for adaptation,” researchers at the firm wrote.
These potential attacks involve powerful quantum computers breaking cryptographic keys that secure Bitcoin and other blockchains, enabling attackers to derive private keys to wallets from public information. However, the researchers argue that this is not an imminent threat to Bitcoin because breaking Bitcoin’s core cryptography would require quantum machines far beyond anything that currently exists.
Bendiksen isolated the scope to legacy Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) addresses, where public keys remain permanently visible on the ledger. CoinShares estimates roughly 1.6 million BTC, representing roughly 8% of the total supply, sits in P2PK wallets. According to the report, only about 10,200 BTC are held in addresses large enough to cause significant market disruption if compromised, as the vast majority of these coins are distributed across more than 32,000 individual UTXOs that hold less than 100 BTC.
The study breaks these holdings down by size, noting that roughly 7,000 BTC are held in wallets averaging 100-1,000 coins, about 3,230 BTC in wallets with 1,000-10,000 coins, and the remaining in addresses averaging 50 BTC each.
Millions of Qubits Needed to Break Bitcoin; Current Quantum Systems at 105
CoinShares claims it would take an extraordinary amount of time to crack the smaller holdings even in highly optimistic quantum scenarios, with the tail risk appearing manageable relative to bitcoin’s 21 million total supply. The digital asset manager and ETF issuer argued that claims of 25% vulnerability often include temporary risks, such as the reusage of exchange addresses, which can be easily mitigated through operational upgrades.
The researchers estimate that even the most advanced quantum computers are 10 to 100,000 times too weak to pose a real-world threat, pushing meaningful risk into the next decade or later. The report indicates reversing a public key within 24 hours would require a fault-tolerant quantum computer with 13 million physical qubits, approximately 100,000 times the capacity of today’s most advanced systems.
Breaking a private key within an hour requires a quantum computer that is roughly 3 million times more powerful than existing systems. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet claimed that while Google’s Willow supercomputer operates at 105 qubits, millions of qubits would be necessary to break current asymmetric cryptography, with each additional qubit exponentially increasing the difficulty of maintaining system coherence.
Still, legacy Bitcoin addresses could be vulnerable over long timeframes, while attacking active transactions would require near-instant computations that remain far out of reach. CoinShares said in the report that theoretical quantum risk to the alpha cryptocurrency and its underlying system stems from algorithms that could eventually expose cryptographic keys or weaken hashing. However, the researchers stressed that these threats are distant and narrowly scoped.
Though aggressive fixes could secure the network beforehand, the firm warned that it also carries inherent risks, such as software bugs, forced assumptions about dormant coins, and eroding Bitcoin’s neutrality and trust. The report recommends making a gradual, voluntary migration to mitigate the actual quantum threat.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $70,464 – up 1.62% in 24 hours.
