Galaxy Digital has pledged up to $5 million in grants for open-source developers working on post-quantum cryptography for Bitcoin.

The company also established a quantum advisory council as part of its Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative, which it announced Tuesday. According to Galaxy, the council includes Barry Sanders, professor and scientific director of Quantum City at the University of Calgary; Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss fellow; and Eran Tromer, professor of computer science at Boston University.

The grant program is intended to support work on quantum-resistant upgrade proposals, post-quantum cryptography, Bitcoin signature schemes, migration tooling for wallets and custodians, and formal security audits. Those areas are central to any future Bitcoin transition because changing signature schemes would affect protocol design, wallet software, custody systems and user migration practices, not just cryptographic research.

Bitcoin’s exposure to future quantum computing capabilities has become a growing area of discussion. Analytics provider Glassnode has said about 30% of Bitcoin’s supply could be exposed if cryptographically relevant quantum computers emerge. That figure includes 10% of supply described as “structurally unsafe” because of its output type, and another 20% described as “operationally unsafe” because of key or address management practices.

Source: Glassnode

Debate continues over quantum computing timelines

The timeline for a practical quantum computing breakthrough remains disputed across the Bitcoin and cryptography communities.

In November 2025, Blockstream CEO Adam Back said Bitcoin faces no meaningful quantum threat for at least the next 20 to 40 years. Back said that timeframe gives the network sufficient time to adopt post-quantum cryptography standards approved by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

In August 2024, NIST published three post-quantum cryptography standards covering key establishment and digital signatures. The standards include key exchange, digital signature and hash-based signature algorithms that could be used in future post-quantum migrations across industries, including potential Bitcoin upgrades.

In December 2025, Blockstream Research released a paper proposing a hash-based signature scheme as a “promising path for securing Bitcoin in a post-quantum world.” The proposal would replace Bitcoin’s ECDSA and Schnorr signatures with a scheme whose security depends solely on cryptographic hash functions.

Wealth management company Bernstein said in an April report that Bitcoin has about three to five years to prepare for a post-quantum security upgrade. Any such upgrade would still need to move through Bitcoin’s open-source development process, including technical review, implementation work and broad ecosystem coordination before users and service providers could adopt it.