Ark Invest finds that over $ 480 billion in bitcoin is vulnerable to quantum threats

ARK Invest has warned of a potential threat to a significant portion of bitcoin BTC $71,523.01 Mezo Wrapped BTC 2.27% Market capitalization $39.88 million VOL. 24 hours $2.38 billion in the future due to the development of quantum computers. According to analysts, about 6.9 million BTC — about a third of the total coin volume — could be at risk if quantum machines learn to crack Bitcoin cryptography.

We are talking about the ECDSA digital signature system based on the secp256k1 curve, which is the basis of network security. With sufficient power, quantum computers can theoretically recover private keys from public ones and steal funds. ARK calls old P2PK wallets, where public keys are already open in the blockchain, the most vulnerable. There are about 1.7 million BTC of such coins, and a significant part of them is considered lost.

Another 5.2 million BTC are also technically vulnerable, but they can be switched to newer address formats if the owners do so before the critical quantum capabilities are exploited. In total, this amounts to about $ 483 billion at a median price of $ 70,000.

At the same time, the report emphasizes that there is no immediate danger. Modern quantum computers are in an intermediate phase of development (NISQ) and have less than a hundred logical qubits, while cracking 256-bit Bitcoin cryptography would require thousands of stable qubits and billions of operations.

The community is already discussing protection against the future threat. One option is BIP-360, a proposal to implement quantum-resistant address structures compatible with Taproot. The main question is whether the network will have time to update and whether holders of vulnerable coins will switch to safer formats before quantum technologies reach the required level.