Quantum computing has been crypto’s slow-moving problem for years. There is broad agreement that the threat itself is real: if a sufficiently large quantum computer is built, the mathematics protecting wallets would stop working. What remains disputed is how to move hundreds of millions of wallets to new addresses before that happens, especially for long-dormant accounts that may never see a migration notice. A new paper published by blockchain security firm AmericanFortress argues that the migration step was never necessary and that users would not need to rotate keys or change wallet addresses.

Address Migration Was Always the Bottleneck

A quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can derive a private key directly from the matching public key. That would put nearly every crypto wallet in existence at risk of exposure. The conventional fix would be to move assets to a post-quantum signature scheme. But doing so would require changing the public key format, which in practice means address migration across every participating network.

The problem, the paper argues, is that some coins cannot migrate. Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC, for example, have not moved since 2010. The holders of millions more coins sitting in dormant wallets are not likely to read migration notices either. That makes the migration question more than a technical detail: it is the operational hurdle that could determine whether any retrofit can reach every address in circulation.

Prove You Know the Seed, Don’t Sign With It

The paper’s approach is straightforward in concept. When a wallet is created, the user writes down a seed phrase. Every address in that wallet is generated from those words. The seed is the root, and the addresses are branches.

The proposal, called ZKPoSP, or Zero-Knowledge Proof of Seed Provenance, removes the signing step and instead has the wallet prove that it knows the seed. It does this with a zero-knowledge proof, a method for showing that a statement is true without revealing the information that makes it true. In this design, the wallet demonstrates that it knows the seed behind the address without exposing the seed itself. Nodes verify the proof and approve the transaction.

Under this model, the address remains unchanged. The authors say the method requires no address migration and no key registration. The public key is no longer the weak point because it is no longer what authorizes a spend.

A second component, QBIP32, addresses what comes next. Different chains use different underlying cryptography, including Bitcoin and Ethereum on secp256k1 and Solana on Ed25519. The paper argues that existing standards only produce a usable quantum-safe proof as a side effect of their own key format, with no single method that works across curves. It presents QBIP32 as one derivation scheme that can cover any of them. Existing wallets would not need to change, and the paper says current standards, including BIP32 and SLIP-10, already support the proofs on their own.

What Still Has to Happen

The paper describes its quantum protection as conjectured, not proven. No quantum computer exists yet to test it.

Deployment remains the larger challenge. Nodes would need to upgrade before any network can enforce the system. Wallets would need to ship the proving code. Users would not have to do anything only after both sides move first. AmericanFortress also has a patent filing and is licensing the SDK, giving it a commercial stake in adoption.

The paper is available through the International Association for Cryptologic Research ePrint archive at