The resistance of the cryptocurrency industry to quantum computing is urgent.

Written by: Ma He, Foresight News

On June 22, Trump signed two executive orders in one day. One order requires all federal agencies in the United States to upgrade encryption standards for security locks by 2030 to resist the threat of quantum computing decryption; the other order instructs the Department of Energy to lead the construction of a "national quantum computer."

Quantum computing has transitioned from laboratory technology discussions to a nationally mandated program.

At the beginning of 2025, tech industry mogul Jensen Huang expressed a pessimistic view about quantum computers, stating, "It may take another 15 to 30 years for practical quantum computers to be realized," but just two months later, he changed his stance. This year, Nvidia released an AI-driven Ising model, and Huang indicated that this would allow AI to serve as the control plane and operating system for quantum machines, transforming fragile quantum bits into scalable, high-reliability systems, and establishing an industry-level standard infrastructure for quantum computing.

Quantum computing may accelerate significantly under the support of AI. As its development speed increases, the threat to current system security also grows.

Deadline of 2030: The National "Lock Change" Command

Once large-scale quantum computers emerge, the existing encryption systems will be compromised. More insidiously, it could involve harvesting data before decrypting it — adversaries can currently store your encrypted data, waiting a decade until quantum machines mature to slowly crack it.

Thus, the U.S. government has issued a strict order. All federal agencies' high-value assets and high-impact systems must complete the key establishment migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by December 31, 2030, and must also complete the migration of digital signatures to PQC by December 31, 2031.

Each agency must appoint a PQC migration leader within 30 days, who will report directly to the White House OMB and the National Cyber Director. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is required to start its own PQC migration pilot for its systems within 180 days and complete it by the end of 2027.

Additionally, federal procurement regulations will be revised within 180 days, and all contractors supplying to the U.S. government—ranging from Microsoft, Amazon Cloud to various IT service providers—must comply with PQC standards by 2030. The Department of Homeland Security will also assist critical infrastructures like the power grid, banks, hospitals, and telecom operators in developing migration plans.

The U.S. government is pushing for a major upgrade of global internet security infrastructure through executive power.

On the same day, Trump signed another document titled "Opening the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation," which also brought the quantum computing competition to the surface.

The U.S. government is seeking a large device that can be delivered to the Department of Energy's national laboratories to truly solve problems that classical supercomputers cannot. The White House has required the Department of Energy to publicly release technical specifications within 90 days and to explore public-private cooperation models within 180 days.

Perhaps this is the "Manhattan Project" moment for the quantum computing field. The government will provide funding, policies, and orders, using national will to accelerate the evolution of quantum information technology from laboratory prototypes to engineering tools.

The U.S. is racing against time to upgrade encryption, while the encryption industry's codes are already fraught with crisis.

Cryptocurrency Industry's Resistance to Quantum Computing

The foundation of Bitcoin, the ECDSA elliptic curve signature, can theoretically be cracked by quantum computers.

According to research data published by BTQ Technologies in October 2025, approximately 6.65 million Bitcoins (valued at about $745 billion at the time) have had their public keys permanently exposed on-chain, including 1.9 million early P2PK addresses and about 4 million reused Bitcoin addresses.

These BTC do not need to wait for quantum computers to actively attack transaction broadcasts—the public keys have been sitting on the blockchain for over a decade, and once quantum computers mature, they can slowly derive private keys in offline mode.

Since November 2021, the underlying protocol of Bitcoin has not activated a soft fork for over four years. The BIP-360 proposal suggested some mitigation measures, but a complete solution is still distant. Historical experience is also not optimistic. The SegWit upgrade for Bitcoin took three years from its proposal in December 2015 to mainstream adoption in December 2018.

This January, BTQ Technologies Corp. launched a testnet called Bitcoin Quantum. This testnet is fully open and permissionless, inviting miners, developers, researchers, and users to run nodes, build tools, audit cryptography, and conduct stress tests against quantum transactions before the mainnet migration.

However, it remains a significant challenge to achieve consensus among multiple parties.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rebutted that the threat of quantum computing to Bitcoin is greatly exaggerated. "This is not a crypto-specific issue; it's something that needs to be addressed worldwide. We are directly collaborating with core developers to address quantum issues."

Beyond Bitcoin, other project protocols are also actively advancing quantum-resistance plans.

The Ethereum Foundation has established a dedicated post-quantum security research team and prioritized PQC as an initiative. Nico, head of the Ethereum Foundation's privacy project Kohaku, stated that Ethereum can now begin preparing for the post-quantum era at the account level, without waiting for an underlying hard fork upgrade.

Solana has established the Falcon signature standard and announced a three-phase migration roadmap. The NEAR development team plans to add quantum-resistant signature solutions to the testnet by the end of the second quarter of 2026. Zcash expects to achieve post-quantum privacy protection at the protocol level through a Tachyon upgrade by the end of 2026.

In this race for survival against quantum computing, the highly centralized federal agencies have already pressed the '5-year countdown' hard switch. For decentralized networks that are reliant on consensus but have governance efficiency concerns, the true test is not when the quantum crisis will arrive, but whether the industry can achieve this quantum-resistant upgrade before the Satoshi's blind box is completely decrypted.