Bitcoin Giants Unite Against Quantum Threat with $15M Pledge

Nine major firms have formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium to fund work on Bitcoin's long-term security. The consortium, which includes BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy, has pledged $15 million over three years for developers, researchers, and organizations working on the network.

The group's main focus is post-quantum cryptography, a field that develops methods resistant to attacks from classical and quantum computers. Bitcoin currently relies on elliptic curve cryptography, but large-scale quantum computers cannot break it today. However, an attacker could derive a private key from an exposed public key using Shor's algorithm.

The consortium will not direct Bitcoin's protocol or control its development process. Instead, they will select developers and researchers to fund independently, allowing the open-source community to continue debating, testing, and approving changes through Bitcoin's existing process.