Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has called on the Bitcoin community to urgently ramp up efforts to defend against quantum attacks, warning that breakthroughs in quantum computing could arrive sooner than anticipated.
“Within the next five years, I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance of a quantum breakthrough,” Yakovenko said at the All-In Summit 2025, in remarks published on YouTube Friday. “We need to migrate Bitcoin to a quantum-resistant signature scheme.”
Yakovenko cited the rapid pace at which technologies are converging, particularly how quickly AI is moving from research to practical implementation. “It’s astounding,” he said. “I’d encourage people to accelerate their efforts.”
Cybersecurity experts note that the threat of quantum attacks could materialize faster than expected. While some in the Bitcoin community still view it as a distant concern, advances in quantum computing could pose serious risks to current encryption standards used in blockchain systems.
Bitcoin wallets rely on ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) to generate private-public key pairs. Their security depends on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), which is considered infeasible for classical computers to solve—but could become vulnerable to quantum computers.
David Carvalho, founder and chief scientist of Naoris Protocol, warned in June that quantum computers have advanced to the point where they could “plausibly rip” through Bitcoin’s cryptography in less than five years.
Upgrading a blockchain from legacy cryptography to post-quantum security would be a complex task, requiring a hard fork—a move many crypto communities resist.
Bitcoiners remain largely unconcerned about the threat
Some in the Bitcoin community view the quantum risk as distant. Blockstream CEO Adam Back said current quantum computers do not pose a credible threat to Bitcoin but acknowledged they could in the future, estimating that it may take “maybe 20 years” for quantum computing to reach that level.
Similarly, Jan3 founder Samson Mow told Magazine in June that while the risk is real, the timeline is likely still a decade away. “I would say everything else will fail before Bitcoin fails,” Mow added.
