Nine financial and crypto companies have launched a new consortium, pledging $15 million for Bitcoin quantum-resistance work.
BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy and six other Bitcoin companies have pledged a combined $15 million over three years to fund network security work, including defenses against future quantum computers.
Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, Block, Blockstream, Fidelity Digital Assets and Galaxy Digital are also founding members of the newly created Bitcoin Security Consortium, which brings together asset managers, exchanges, custodians, infrastructure providers and corporate Bitcoin holders, Strategy revealed in a Thursday press release.
Read also: Coinbase: 7M Bitcoin Are Vulnerable to Quantum Threat — What BTC Holders Should Do
Still, the consortium won’t operate a central $15 million fund. Each member will decide independently which developers receive its money. Mike Schmidt, the executive director of Bitcoin developer nonprofit Brink, will coordinate the group’s day-to-day work as a volunteer, per the document.
The group also stressed that it won’t speak for the network’s developers, but plans to fund existing open-source work and publish research for the wider public.
Quantum Funding Builds
And work has already started. Brink, a Bitcoin research and development center, awarded its first post-quantum research grant in June to a developer known as Conduition, who is studying hash-based signatures and other possible protections for Bitcoin.
Mike Novogratz’s crypto investment and management giant Galaxy Digital also separately committed up to $5 million to quantum-resistant Bitcoin development on July 21, two days before joining the consortium, Bitcoin Foundation reported earlier.
The new announcement doesn’t clarify whether that pledge is included in the consortium’s $15 million total, though.
- So far, no cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists today, but a sufficiently powerful machine could theoretically break the elliptic-curve cryptography Bitcoin uses to verify ownership and authorize transactions.
Read more: Quantum Computing Threat to Bitcoin: Real or Hype?
