Category: Business

A rare statement by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin (BTC), regarding the potential impact of quantum computers on Bitcoin, has resurfaced.

In a 2010 discussion on the BitcoinTalk forum, a participant with the username “llama” asked whether Bitcoin would become worthless if digital signatures were broken due to quantum computers.

In his response to this question, Satoshi Nakamoto acknowledged that such a risk, if it were to occur suddenly, could lead to serious problems. However, he stated that the system could adapt if the process progressed gradually. According to Nakamoto, the Bitcoin network can maintain its security by transitioning to new and stronger cryptographic algorithms.

Satoshi stated that if users run the updated software, their assets will be automatically resigned with a stronger signature algorithm. He explained that this process would technically be a self-administered operation for the users themselves, meaning the funds would be resent with the new secure signature.

In a statement released by Google today, it was claimed that the encryption method used by cryptocurrencies can be broken with fewer resources than previously thought.

*This is not investment advice.

Bitfarms, one of the leading mining companies in the sector, plans to sell all of its Bitcoin holdings in order to switch to an AI-focused approach.

Bitfarms, a Bitcoin ($BTC) mining company traded on Nasdaq, announced it plans to sell all of its 1,827 $BTC holdings as it shifts its business focus to AI-centric data centers.

The company had already started selling Bitcoin in 2025 and made a profit of $28.2 million. While the company hasn’t disclosed exactly how much $BTC it has sold to date, it’s certain that it will sell more.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon said, “In time, we will have no Bitcoin left.”

Gagnon added that Bitfarms would sell Bitcoin during a major price surge and that, while awaiting this rise, they were continuing mining operations to maximize cash flow before selling their mining equipment.

This approach by the company indicates a gradual liquidation rather than a sudden, abrupt Bitcoin sell-off.

Bitfarms is also undergoing a structural change in addition to its Bitcoin operations. In this regard, shareholders have approved the company’s relocation to the US and its rebranding as Keel Infrastructure (KEEL).

This transaction is expected to be completed on April 1, 2026, after which the company’s shares will trade under the ticker symbol KEEL.

*This is not investment advice.

Bitcoin rose alongside U.S. stocks after Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly said the country would be prepared to end the conflict if it receives security guarantees.

The crypto asset was trading at $67,762, up nearly 2% over the past 24 hours. The Nasdad about doubled its gain on the news, now higher by 3.1%. WTI crude oil, meanwhile, tumbled from just shy of $105 per barrel to $102.

Pezeshkian’s unconfirmed remarks are raising the prospect of a diplomatic off-ramp, easing fears of a wider conflict that could disrupt oil flows, fuel inflation and continue to rattle global markets.

Europe risks losing control of its financial future to the U.S. dollar unless it brings the euro onto blockchain rails, according to Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of bank-backed stablecoin project Qivalis.

The warning reflects the growing concern among European banks and policymakers that the next phase of global finance, increasingly built on blockchain infrastructure, is being dominated overwhelmingly by dollar-pegged stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC.

“If we don’t have a euro onchain with depth of liquidity, then the only alternative is the U.S. dollar,” Sell told CoinDesk. “That’s a real risk to Europe’s financial and digital sovereignty.”

Stablecoins are no longer just crypto. They are now at the core of financial systems globally with a market capitalization of roughly $314 billion currently but could rise to anywhere between $800 billion and $1.15 trillion in the next five years, according to a recent Jeffries calculation.

In traditional finance, the euro accounts for roughly 20% to 25% of global activity, making it the world’s second reserve currency, Sell said. Onchain, however, its presence is almost nonexistent.

“In the blockchain space, the euro makes up about 0.2% of transactions,” Sell said. “That’s a huge disconnect.”

Top 12 EU banks vying for stablecoin dominance

Qivalis, backed by a consortium of 12 major European banks including ING, UniCredit and BBVA, is attempting to close that gap by issuing a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin.

The project is targeting a launch as soon as regulatory approval is secured, with Sell pointing to the second half of the year as a goal, depending on licensing timelines with the Dutch central bank.

Sell said the consortium aims to build the “default” euro-denominated token for global crypto markets, effectively creating a European alternative to dominant dollar stablecoins.

“We want to be the main issuer of euro stablecoins globally,” he said. At its core, Qivalis is positioning itself as infrastructure rather than just a token. “We’re building the interface between blockchain and the euro,” Sell said. “It has to be available wherever the use cases are.”

Qivalis is designed to address a key issue that has held back euro stablecoins so far: fragmentation.

“A couple of banks trying to issue their own coins just fragments the space further,” Sell said. “Bringing institutions together creates the distribution and liquidity needed to make it usable.”

Not the ECB’s digital euro

The project comes as the European Central Bank (ECB) continues work on a digital euro it aims to release no earlier than 2029, but Sell said the two efforts are fundamentally different.

ECB President Christine Lagarde recently said the bank had finalized its part of the central bank digital euro and it was now up to political institutions to act. The project, which aims to create a public digital means of payment, is under review by the European Council and the European Parliament.

Qivalis will issue a private, MiCA-regulated stablecoin, while the ECB’s plans rely on centralized infrastructure.

“We don’t see it as competition,” Sell said. “It’s an enhancement of the same financial stack.”

He described a “monetary stack” in which central bank money sits on centralized systems, while blockchain-based use cases, such as cross-border payments and onchain settlement, require a euro-native asset on public networks.

“At the moment, if you want to operate onchain, you’re effectively forced into the dollar,” he said.

A race against dollar dominance

The urgency behind the project is tied to how quickly financial activity is shifting toward blockchain-based systems — from crypto trading to global payments and decentralized finance.

Qivalis is betting that a bank-backed, regulated approach can compete with incumbent dollar stablecoins by building liquidity and integrating across exchanges, custodians and DeFi platforms.

“We’re looking to build that entire ecosystem around the euro onchain,” Sell said.

Part of the challenge is not just issuing the token, but creating demand in markets where dollar stablecoins are already deeply embedded.

Sell pointed to currency risk as one reason euro-denominated alternatives could gain traction.

“If you’re a European user earning yield in dollars, you’re also exposed to FX risk,” he said, noting that exchange rate moves can offset returns.

A question of financial sovereignty

As more financial activity moves onto blockchain rails, the absence of a widely adopted euro stablecoin could leave Europe structurally dependent on dollar-based infrastructure.

“One of the risks is that as more activity moves onchain, if there’s no usable euro, then everything just happens in dollars,” he said.

“We’re looking to build a cornerstone of European digital autonomy. If we don’t have this, we will face dollarization.”

The goal, he added, is not to replace the dollar outright, but to ensure the euro remains competitive in a rapidly evolving financial system.

“It’s about putting the euro back in its place as the second global reserve currency in this space as well,” Sell said. “It’s about putting the financial future back in our hands as Europeans.”

In the past, crypto regulation in the U.S. has been badly fractured. Not only did federal agencies fail to collaborate — they outright contradicted and cajoled each other in a turf war to control our nascent industry.

But recent signals from regulators suggest movement.

Earlier this month, the SEC and the CFTC released a Memorandum of Understanding to address past missteps and improve coordination for greater regulatory clarity. And even more importantly, the two agencies issued joint guidance last week on how securities and commodities laws apply to crypto assets.

This is outstanding progress, and a helpful step towards bringing crypto innovation back onshore. Still, there are other critical areas where disagreement among the agencies creates needless uncertainty for American business and consumers. First among them are the rules around financial privacy.

The U.S. has no single privacy regulator. Instead, financial privacy is affected by the actions of the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the SEC, just to name a few. And when those agencies diverge, uncertainty follows.

Treasury’s 2019 guidance on non-custodial crypto services was later contradicted by the DOJ’s enforcement against the creators of the Tornado Cash privacy software. Only recently has the DOJ softened its position, while the Treasury has reopened the conversation through a request for comment. A subsequent Treasury report noted the potentially valuable and lawful uses of privacy-protecting technology like mixers, even as it floated the possibility of rescinding its own 2019 guidance. Separately, multiple SEC commissioners have lately questioned whether the mandatory>developers and anyone who desires privacy for personal or financial reasons. But while the stakes are high, all of this government reexamination is long overdue. For many years, we normalized the bulk collection of data stemming from the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970. The logic was simple, yet persuasive: why be afraid if you have nothing to hide?

But there is growing recognition that our sweeping financial surveillance regime has become a government panopticon at odds with our democratic values. Banks and other financial institutions are required to spy on customers and turn over their data to the government on the barest of suspicions. After decades of overzealous enforcement and penalties, many institutions have learned to err on the side of over-disclosure.

Financial institutions across the U.S. and Canada spend billions of dollars annually on compliance. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. The even bigger cost of this surveillance is privacy deadweight loss — economic and social activity that never occurs because participants are forced into a false choice between revealing everything or not participating at all.

This effect is visible across the financial system. Consumers and merchants continue to pay high fees to use credit cards, despite blockchain-based payment systems that could perform the same function at a fraction of the cost. Financial institutions rely on settlement infrastructure designed decades ago, with all the costs, delays, and errors that come with manual processing from the pre-Internet stone-aged days.

These outdated systems persist because we have not yet created a financial privacy framework for the digital era. When a system requires full exposure, rational actors opt out. Banks, asset managers, and market makers will not move their operations to a system where proprietary strategies, client positions, or portfolio construction are revealed to all.

The good news is that we have the technology to solve all of these problems. Modern cryptography, like zero-knowledge proofs, allows participants to prove compliance, solvency, or eligibility without revealing underlying data. As a result of these breakthroughs, fully private transactions can be conducted on fully public blockchains.

If we can do it for the securities and commodities laws, we can do it for financial privacy. Much of our law already recognizes that financial privacy is not only an important civil liberty, but an essential economic good. Software developers and market participants do not need loopholes; they need to know what the law requires of them. Because if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that markets do not fail only when rules are wrong. They also fail when uncertainty keeps participants from showing up at all.

Bhutan, a small kingdom in the Himalayan region, has once again made headlines with its cryptocurrency transactions. According to data from the onchain analytics platform Arkham, the Bhutanese government transferred approximately 374.9 Bitcoin, generating a transaction value of $25.2 million.

Today’s transfer was reportedly sent to an unlabeled address starting with “bc1q0”. Analysts say this address has previously transferred $BTC acquired from Bhutan to institutional investors like Galaxy Digital. This has led to speculation that the government might be selling $BTC. However, the exact purpose of the transfer has not yet been officially announced.

On the other hand, it has been reported that the total outflows from Bhutanese wallets in the last week have exceeded 1,000 $BTC. Previously, transfers of 519.7 $BTC were made on March 25th and 123.7 $BTC on March 27th. It was noted that addresses linked to QCP Capital were also involved in these transactions.

According to Arkham data, Bhutan currently holds approximately 3,954 $BTC, worth around $263.9 million. However, the country’s reserves have significantly decreased from their peak of approximately 13,000 $BTC in October 2024.

Bhutan, unlike many other countries, is known for building its Bitcoin reserves through hydroelectric mining rather than confiscation. However, speculation has recently increased that new production has slowed.

*This is not investment advice.

Google just told the crypto industry the threat is closer than anyone priced in. The industry, for once, is listening.

A whitepaper published late Monday by Google’s Quantum AI team found that breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography protecting bitcoin and Ethereum wallets could require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits (a unit of computation in quantum systems), roughly a 20-fold reduction from previous estimates that placed the requirement in the millions.

The paper also described how a quantum computer could crack bitcoin private keys in about nine minutes once a transaction exposes a public key, giving an attacker a 41% chance of beating bitcoin’s 10-minute confirmation window.

The research landed like a bomb across online crypto circles. Not because it says quantum computers can break bitcoin today — they can’t — but because it dramatically compresses the timeline for when they might.

“We are no longer looking at mid-2030s, we could have quantum computers of this scale by the end of the decade,” said Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, on X. “All blockchains need a transition plan ASAP. Post-quantum is no longer a drill.”

Qureshi pointed to an unusual detail in Google’s disclosure. The team did not publish the actual quantum circuits. Instead, they released a zero-knowledge proof that verifies the circuits exist without revealing how they work. “This is very atypical, showing Google thinks this is serious,” he said.

Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher who joined the Google paper as a late co-author, said his “confidence in q-day by 2032 has shot up significantly,” estimating at least a 10% chance that a quantum computer recovers a ‘secp256k1’ private key from an exposed public key by that date.

Drake noted the optimized quantum circuit is “just 100 million Toffoli gates, which is surprisingly shallow,” and that on a superconducting platform, the total runtime would be roughly 1,000 seconds.

“Low-hanging fruit is still being picked, with at least one of the Google optimizations resulting from a surprisingly simple observation,” Drake added. “AI was not yet tasked to find optimizations.”

While human researchers are still finding straightforward improvements, the floor for the number of qubits needed hasn’t been reached. Drake said logical qubit counts “could plausibly go under 1,000 soonish.”

Security engineer Conor Deegan, whose published research was cited in the Google paper, offered one of the most technically detailed responses. He flagged a pattern in which the paper surfaces across multiple chains: quantum computation acts as a one-time cost that produces indefinitely reusable classical exploits.

Ethereum’s ‘KZG’ trusted setup, Zcash’s ‘Sapling’ protocol, and Litecoin’s ‘MimbleWimble’ all embed elliptic curve hardness into fixed public parameters that only need to be broken once.

“Deploying new cryptographic infrastructure on ECDLP curves is now indefensible given these resource estimates,” Deegan said.

The paper estimates roughly 6.9 million bitcoin, about one-third of the total supply, sit in wallets where public keys have already been exposed. That includes 1.7 million $BTC from the network’s early years, including Satoshi Nakamoto’s (the mysterious creator of the Bitcoin network), as well as additional funds affected by address reuse.

CoinDesk reported earlier Monday that bitcoin’s 2021 Taproot upgrade, which was designed to enable more efficient, private transactions, also exposed public keys on the blockchain by default, a technical move that now carries quantum risk.

That figure dwarfs CoinShares’ February estimate that only about 10,200 $BTC is concentrated enough to cause “appreciable market disruption” if stolen. Google’s methodology counts all exposed keys, not just large balances.

The Bitcoin vs Ethereum divide

The reaction split along familiar lines. Ethereum’s preparation drew praise. Bitcoin’s lack of it drew alarm.

“You can think of q-day as Y2K but real,” said well-followed crypto investor only known as ‘McKenna,’ managing partner at Arete. “People should give thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for being early and leading this research. The messy part about this is Bitcoin. The lack of urgency and the consensus issue on what to do with vulnerable coins.”

The Ethereum Foundation launched pq.ethereum.org last week with eight years of post-quantum research, more than 10 client teams shipping weekly devnets, and a multi-fork migration roadmap.

Drake, who co-authored the Google paper, is part of that same Ethereum team — a direct link between the researchers quantifying the threat and the developers building the defense.

Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of StarkWare, urged the Bitcoin community to “strengthen initiatives like BIP 360,” a proposal that would introduce quantum-resistant wallet formats allowing voluntary migration.

“Saying that quantum computers are coming is not FUD,” Ben-Sasson said. “FUD is claiming Bitcoin can’t adapt. It can adapt. Just need to start working on these solutions today.”

Bitcoin advocate Bit Paine offered a measured take. “I still think roughly 10 years is the more likely timeframe, but I assign an uncomfortably high likelihood that we see something disruptive within five years. High enough that action within the next one to two years is prudent.”

The element that shifted his thinking was the “persistent non-linearities in QC progress and the shroud of secrecy underlying this research.” When estimates of physical qubits drop by orders of magnitude, he said, “we may not have much of a window between ‘quantum is on a trajectory to disrupt bitcoin’ and ‘secp256k1 is broken.’”

Paine added a national security dimension. “A CRQC may be developed in stealth mode and drop out of seemingly nowhere.”

Google’s decision to use a zero-knowledge proof rather than publish the circuits reinforces that point. If the world’s leading quantum lab self-censors its own research for safety reasons, state actors with equivalent or superior capabilities are unlikely to publish at all.

Drake echoed this. “From now on, assume state-of-the-art algorithms will be censored. A blackout in academic publications would be a tell-tale sign.”

Why crypto?

Some industry voices questioned why Google aimed its most detailed analysis at crypto rather than banking or military systems. ETF analyst Eric Balchunas asked why Google would “apply this research time/money on crypto versus something of way more societal consequence.”

Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures, had the answer: blockchains are the most brittle systems relying on the encryption that quantum computers can break. “Banks don’t fail because you reverse engineer a single key. Blockchains do,” Carter said. “They are much more brittle. Banks will upgrade anyway. There won’t be an attack surface there.”

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao urged calm but acknowledged the practical difficulty.

“All crypto has to do is upgrade to quantum-resistant algorithms. So, no need to panic,” Zhao said. “In practice, there are some execution considerations. It’s hard to organize upgrades in a decentralized world.”

Zhao also raised the Satoshi question directly. If those coins move during a migration, “it means he is still around, which is interesting to know.” If they don’t, he said, “it might be better to lock or effectively burn those addresses so that they don’t go to the first hacker who cracks it.”

The most popular counterargument on crypto X was that quantum computing breaks everything, not just blockchains.

“If quantum kills Bitcoin, it also kills the global banking system, SWIFT transfers, stock exchanges, military communications, nuclear command systems, every HTTPS website on earth,” wrote crypto commentator Quinten Francois.

Elon Musk struck a lighter note, posting that at least “if you forgot the password to your wallet, it will be accessible in the future.”

The paper addresses this framing head-on. Centralized systems, from banks to military networks, can push software updates to their users. A decentralized blockchain cannot. The timeline to migrate bitcoin’s infrastructure, including user wallets, exchange support, and new address formats, could take five to 10 years even after a solution is agreed upon.
Meanwhile, Google said it is working alongside Coinbase, the Stanford Institute for Blockchain Research, and the Ethereum Foundation on responsible approaches to the transition.

The company framed its research not as an attack on crypto but as an effort to “support the long-term health of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

The message from nearly every corner of the industry is now the same. The threat is no longer theoretical; it’s time to act. The only variable left is whether the protocols that need to migrate will do so before the hardware catches up.

Read more: Here’s how bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks are preparing for the looming quantum threat