On June 22, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders that put the federal government’s most sensitive civilian computer systems on the 2031 post-quantum security timeline, while also launching a national effort to accelerate the development of advanced quantum computers.
One order requires the federal government’s high-value assets and high-impact systems to adopt post-quantum cryptography for establishing cryptographic keys by the end of 2030 and for digital signatures by the end of 2031.
The second will create a program aimed at providing Department of Energy facilities with quantum computers capable of scientific applications beyond the scope of existing classical machines.
Charles Edwards, founder of Caprioles, said:
“Quantum computing is probably the world’s most undervalued asset class.”
Washington advances quantum clock
Market participants noted that these orders signal that the federal government views the timeline for quantum development and crypto transition as rapidly compressing.
Alex Pruden, CEO of quantum security company Project Eleven, said:
“From the perspective of the U.S. executive branch, offense (quantum computing) and defense (post-quantum cryptography) are now on the same five-year horizon. The transition to post-quantum cryptography is no longer a matter of tomorrow; it is a matter of today.”
Notably, the first order establishes a quantum computing initiative for application development and scientific discovery known as QC-ADDS.
This signals a clear intent to deliver at least one quantum machine, capable of scientific applications beyond classical computing, to a Department of Energy facility. Structurally, the order requires the department to define technical specifications within 90 days and consider costs, partnerships, and potential delivery schedules within 180 days.
Another five-year provision in the order requires the secretaries of Commerce, Defense, and Energy to work with NASA administrators to develop operational plans for deploying quantum-enabled sensors and networks.
The second order sets strict deadlines for civilian agencies, requiring federal high-asset and high-impact civilian systems to adopt post-quantum cryptography for key establishment by December 31, 2030, and for digital signatures by December 31, 2031.
National security systems are excluded from these specific civilian deadlines and are processed through a separate confidential reporting process.
White House science adviser Michael Kratsios framed the push as an expansion of long-term strategic technology goals. He said the new directive aims to build a strong domestic supply chain and America’s quantum workforce through the expansion of the Registered Apprenticeship Program and the establishment of the National Quantum Workforce Development Institute.
Additionally, the order reconstitutes the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Board and expands the Quantum Counterintelligence Protection Team to protect domestic research from foreign spies.
These actions follow an established pattern of technology policy enacted over the past 18 months, including the creation of the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors in January 2025 and the Genesis Mission in November 2025, which focused on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discoveries across quantum and advanced physics.
Notably, these Trump executive orders build on a letter of intent signed last month by the U.S. Department of Commerce to provide just over $2 billion in program funding to nine quantum computing companies.
These are designed as investments in industrial manufacturing rather than standard research grants. In the planned package, IBM will receive $1 billion to establish a quantum-grade superconducting wafer foundry, while GlobalFoundries is earmarked to receive $375 million for a multi-architecture manufacturing plant.
The remaining $636 million will be divided among seven companies specializing in superconducting, trapped ion, photonic, and neutral atomic quantum architectures.
Nearly 7 million Bitcoins in quantum computing fire
The compressed migration schedule is quickly drawing attention back to the crypto industry. The crypto industry currently has an output of about 7 million BTC, equivalent to about $449 billion in Bitcoin, whose public keys are public and could theoretically be attacked by sufficiently powerful quantum computers.
Modern cryptocurrency security models rely heavily on public key cryptography. For traditional computers, deriving a private spending key from a public broadcast key would require exponential time, making it virtually impossible.
However, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Scholl’s algorithm can solve the underlying discrete logarithm problem in polynomial time. This feature allows an attacker to recover the private key from the public key published on the blockchain, giving them complete control over the associated funds.
While the underlying Bitcoin protocol remains structurally sound, the danger comes from how blockchain network users interact with it.
A 21Shares report revealed that around 65% of all Bitcoins remain protected from immediate disclosure as the network hides the public keys until the coins are exhausted. This protocol feature limits the immediate attack surface.
However, these coins are not inherently quantum safe. When a user spends from an address, their public key is exposed on-chain, creating a vulnerability if the remaining funds are not handled correctly.
On the other hand, the risk is highly concentrated in addresses that are already broadcasting credentials. Data shows that more than 70% of these breaches are caused by address reuse, the act of a user repeatedly receiving and spending funds from the same wallet address, permanently exposing the public key.
This vulnerability continues to grow despite changes in industry standards, with address reuse risk alone increasing by 28,306 BTC in May 2026 and approximately 500,000 BTC over the past year. This movement reflects a steady influx of traditional practices that offset improvements elsewhere.
Moreover, this vulnerable capital has been significantly consolidated. According to data analyzed by Dune, approximately 84.5% of the breached Bitcoins were stored in just 4,079 wallets.
According to 21Shares, most of these high-value targets remain completely anonymous, and nearly 80% have no public label, making it difficult for compliance firms to pinpoint which institutions and large holders pose the most concentrated risks.
Dormant Satoshi-era coins complicate Bitcoin escape plans
In addition to active users causing poor wallet hygiene, the Bitcoin network faces serious structural challenges stemming from early blocks.
21Shares pointed out that approximately 1.08 million Bitcoins mined in 2009 have remained completely static for 16 years.
These coins are widely believed to belong to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and are held in Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) outputs. This early form directly exposes the public keys on the blockchain ledger, making it the weakest supply layer on the network.
Dune’s analysis data shows that the voluntary attrition of these legacy addresses is very slow.
According to 21Shares, the broader permanent public tier is decreasing at a rate of only about 500 BTC per month as old keys are slowly migrated or lost. At this observed pace, analysts estimate that it could take almost three centuries to spontaneously wipe out widespread inventories of permanently public coins.
Karim Abdelmaula, senior analyst at 21Shares, said:
“The market doesn’t need to wait for quantum computers to work. On the day we see the 2009 coin move for the first time in 16 years, each holder will reprice the value of Bitcoin’s safety. Coins that are well held are not a direct target. Repricing is important and it will affect the overall valuation of BTC regardless.”
This looming market risk has led developers to consider unprecedented technological interventions. In April, controversy emerged over BIP-361, a draft bill that would phase out traditional spending from vulnerable addresses and leave unmigrated legacy coins effectively unusable.
BIP-361 provides an overview of the multi-layered approach. The first phase will prevent users from sending additional funds to quantum-vulnerable addresses. A later phase, proposed to begin approximately five years after activation, will limit the expenditure of traditional Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithms (ECDSA) and Schnorr signatures and require specialized quantum-safe rescue processes.
Coins whose owners cannot meet the new cryptographic conditions will eventually be frozen.
Implementing such proposals would force decentralized networks to make choices they have never faced before. We can either allow dormant coins to be stolen by external attackers in the future, or we can change the fundamental rules to freeze coins and break the immutable promise that valid coins can be moved at any time by legitimate key holders.
Bitcoin’s most difficult problem will be transferring holders.
Despite the rapid deployment of government capital and tightening federal timelines, some researchers argue that the immediate vigilance over the security of digital assets is mathematically misplaced.
Martin Hiesboeck, Head of Research at Uphold, pointed out that the global crypto community already has robust post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards and is actively integrating them.
He pointed out:
“We are not flying blind. The short-term danger is not with the technology we currently foresee. We know the exact vulnerabilities, specifically how Scholl’s algorithm impacts ECDSA and Schnorr signatures, and we are actively building structural mitigations to replace these legacy layers long before fault-tolerant systems arrive.”
Rather, Hiesboec warned that the real risk is that once quantum hardware operates at real scale, the entire system becomes unpredictable.
The real danger, he says, lies not in what can be mathematically modeled today, but rather in unmapped ranges, unexpected computational efficiencies, and new hardware capabilities that cannot be predicted before fault-tolerant computers are built.
Recent technology updates show that the gap is closing, but commercially relevant machines capable of exploiting blockchain vulnerabilities are still years away. Modern quantum hardware suffers from physical error rates that are approximately 10 million times higher than cryptographic attacks.
However, a technical report published in March by Google researchers demonstrated a method that could reduce the physical resources required for such an attack by a factor of 20. Following these discoveries, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake estimated that there is a more than 1 in 10 chance of cryptographically relevant quantum computers appearing by 2032.
Despite years of warning, upgrading decentralized financial networks has historically proven to be a very slow process.
An analysis by 21Shares estimates that only 47.6% of Bitcoin’s total supply resides in Segregated Witness (SegWit) outputs, nine years after the upgrade officially began on the network.
Developing a mathematically appropriate post-quantum signature correction may therefore prove to be an easy part of the equation. The bigger challenge is for millions of independent users around the world to coordinate and move their capital to quantum-secure addresses before capable hardware arrives.
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin
