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1.92 Million Bitcoins Are Not Protected Against Quantum Computers — Glassnode
Around 10% of Bitcoin’s total supply is at risk due to the development of quantum computers, according to analytics platform Glassnode, which pointed to the need for implementing a quantum-resistant solution such as BIP-360.
According to Glassnode, approximately 1.92 million bitcoins are affected. This group includes coins mined during the active era of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto using the Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) format, legacy Pay-to-Multisig (P2MS) structures, and modern Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) addresses. All of these are structured in a way that makes the owner’s public key visible on the blockchain by default — and no address management measures can change that. The platform shared this information on the social network X.
Whose Coins Are at Risk
Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to control around 1.1 million BTC, or 5.5% of the potentially vulnerable coins. Another 620,000 coins from the Satoshi era (3.1%) and approximately 200,000 coins (1%) are held on Taproot addresses.
Institutional holdings are also not fully secure. According to organisation-level data, 100% of the bitcoins held by Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Robinhood are exposed to risk; 99% of the bitcoins held by neobank Revolut are also vulnerable; 52% of Grayscale holdings are at risk; and 2% of Fidelity Investments Bitcoin assets fall into the risk zone.
Among cryptocurrency exchanges, the picture is mixed: only about 5% of BTC on Coinbase are exposed to the threat, while the figure reaches 85% on Binance and nearly 100% on Bitfinex.
Scale of the Problem and Technical Details
In addition to the structurally vulnerable 9.6% of Bitcoin’s total supply, analysts identified another 20.6% — around 4.12 million BTC — as “operationally insecure”. These coins are at risk due to issues related to key or address management. Meanwhile, Glassnode considers approximately 13.99 million bitcoins (69.8% of the total supply of the leading cryptocurrency) to be protected against the quantum threat. This estimate is close to the figures published by investment manager ARK Invest, which estimates that 65% of the supply remains secure.
It is important to understand that the real threat will emerge only if quantum computers become capable of breaking elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which underpins Bitcoin. At present, this goal remains unattainable for existing systems.
Paths Towards Quantum Protection
Glassnode emphasised that a significant portion of the structural vulnerability “can be reduced if wallet infrastructure, address standards, and user behaviour evolve.” As noted by ARK Invest, the question of how to implement and deploy post-quantum cryptography (PQC) on the network should be considered separately from the issue of coins that are already exposed to quantum vulnerability. However, in practice, these topics are often conflated, and debates surrounding the latter complicate discussions of the former.
AI Perspective
From the perspective of machine-driven data analysis, the debate around Bitcoin’s quantum threat has an interesting parallel with the internet’s migration to HTTPS during the 2010s: back then, a known risk also existed for years, while mass migration only began after specific incidents occurred.
A key technical nuance worth highlighting is that the vulnerabilities of P2PK and P2TR addresses differ fundamentally in nature. Coins stored on P2PK addresses already expose their public keys directly on the blockchain, whereas P2TR addresses reveal them only when funds are spent, leaving owners with a narrow but genuine window for protective migration.
Notably, the highest concentration of risk is found not among private users but among institutional players whose addresses are publicly known. The critical question is whether major platforms will manage to coordinate migration efforts before the quantum threshold becomes an engineering reality rather than merely a theoretical possibility.
See also: "HYPE ETF Trading Volumes Have Increased Eightfold Since Launch — Bloomberg Analyst"
