Galaxy Digital Says Quantum Threat to Bitcoin Is Real, but Most Wallets Remain Safe

Highlights:

• A Galaxy Digital analyst said quantum risk exists, but only wallets with exposed public keys face danger.
• He said most Bitcoin wallets remain safe unless public keys appear on-chain.
• Owens said developer work on quantum protection has picked up since last year.

Galaxy said a future quantum threat to Bitcoin (BTC) is possible, but wallet risk is not the same across the network. In a Thursday report, Galaxy Digital research analyst Will Owens said a powerful quantum computer could theoretically recover private keys from public keys. Such a scenario could let an attacker fake ownership, create a valid signature, and steal funds.

Why Some Bitcoin Wallets Are More Exposed

Still, Owens made clear that danger is not immediate for every holder. He said wallet exposure depends on one important condition: whether a public key can already be seen on-chain. In his view, wallet safety must be judged by structure and spending behaviour rather than fear alone.

Owens said the risk does not affect most wallets at present. He noted that coins become vulnerable only when public keys are exposed on the blockchain. Owens said wallet risk mostly shows up in two situations. One is when a wallet’s public key is already exposed on-chain. The other is when the public key becomes visible after the wallet spends funds.

quantum computing may threaten classical cryptography, including the crypto that powers bitcoin transactions

if there’s even a chance that’s true, the bitcoin community should work to prepare and mitigate

the good news is that bitcoin devs are indeed working on it pic.twitter.com/ZBf369mXOG

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) March 19, 2026

Owens Defends Bitcoin Developers on Quantum Work

Owens also answered criticism of Bitcoin Core developers. Some people online said developers were ignoring quantum risk and blocking ideas like the BIP 360 soft fork. Owens disagreed and said work on the issue has moved faster since late 2025.

He said:

“Contrary to some public criticism, our review found substantial developer work addressing the question of quantum vulnerabilities and mitigations. The ecosystem now has a concrete and maturing set of proposals spanning the full problem surface. These proposals are not theoretical. They are being actively developed, reviewed, and debated by some of the most experienced contributors in the Bitcoin ecosystem.”

Owens said that even if developers agree on a quantum-safe solution, Bitcoin could still face a big challenge in making it happen. Since Bitcoin has no single leader or central control, any major update would need broad support across the network. Still, Owens appeared confident about the situation. He suggested that this kind of threat could bring people together more easily because it affects everyone in the network. Miners, holders, and exchanges all have a clear financial reason to support Bitcoin’s safety.

BIP 360 Moves From Idea to Live Testing

Work on possible fixes is no longer just part of the debate. On Thursday, BTQ Technologies said it had launched Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 and described it as the first working version of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360. The testing is being done on a separate blockchain instead of Bitcoin’s main network. This gives developers, miners, and researchers a safer way to study the model without putting real Bitcoin at risk.

JUST IN: A testnet for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 has been deployed, which aims to strengthen Bitcoin against quantum 👀 pic.twitter.com/sftxdC2ttQ

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) March 19, 2026

BIP 360 brings a new transaction format called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, or P2MR. BTQ said the goal is to address a long-term concern linked to Bitcoin’s Taproot system. Taproot helped expand Bitcoin’s use and supports tools and networks such as Ark, BitVM, and Lightning. But BTQ believes Taproot’s key-path spending can expose public keys on-chain, which could become a problem in the future if quantum computers grow strong enough to break current cryptography through Shor’s algorithm. According to BTQ, BIP 360 deals with that issue in a simpler way. The design lowers public-key exposure by removing one part and replacing it with a method based on the Merkle root.