The Nasdaq-listed firm's programme funds migration tooling, post-quantum signature work and formal audits, with an advisory council of academics from Calgary, MIT and Boston University. Applications open immediately.
Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative on Monday, committing up to $5 million in developer grants and standing up a research programme and an academic advisory council to prepare the network for the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers.
The Nasdaq-listed firm framed the effort as a gap-closing exercise. "There's a gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and the Bitcoin development world, which is just beginning to engage with post-quantum cryptography in earnest," said Alex Thorn, Galaxy's head of firmwide research. The gap is not new. Nobel physicist John Martinis warned in April that bitcoin could be cracked in minutes as quantum hardware advances; a researcher on the Project Eleven prize claimed a bitcoin bounty after breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on a quantum computer. The willingness of a Nasdaq-listed treasury operator to write cheques against it is.
Grants will fund four categories of work: quantum-resistant transaction proposals, integration of post-quantum signature schemes into Bitcoin, migration tooling for wallets and custodians, and formal security audits of proposed implementations. Awards are milestone-based, and applications are open immediately via a dedicated Galaxy email address. That framing matters because previous corporate quantum efforts (Coinbase's advisory council in January, Michael Saylor's Bitcoin Security Program announced in February) have mostly been about publishing analysis rather than paying developers to write code.
The advisory council reads like a decision to bring academic seriousness in from the start. Its three inaugural members are Barry Sanders, Professor and Scientific Director of Quantum City at the University of Calgary; Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss Fellow; and Eran Tromer, a Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. Sanders is a physicist. Tromer is a working cryptographer. Bérubé is a policy specialist. The composition suggests Galaxy is treating the problem as an engineering, cryptography and governance question at once, which matches the actual shape of the challenge.
Mike Novogratz, Galaxy's chief executive, put it plainly: "As leaders in the digital assets space, we believe it's important that we help be part of the solution to any potential threat quantum computing poses to Bitcoin." Novogratz is best known for aggressive price calls, and $5 million is not a large cheque for a firm of Galaxy's size. But no other US-listed crypto firm has put this much money on the table for post-quantum Bitcoin work, and the milestone structure lets the programme scale if applications warrant.
The engineering picture is more advanced than public discourse suggests. BIP-360, developer Hunter Beast's proposal to remove public-key exposure from standard Bitcoin transactions, was merged into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository this year, and BTQ Technologies has deployed a working implementation on a quantum testnet. A follow-on proposal, BIP-361, would phase out legacy signatures over time. Solana already has post-quantum signature code from two independent client teams running on GitHub. Ethereum has a dedicated post-quantum research team and a $1 million research prize. Circle is building Arc, a new layer-1 with quantum-resistant cryptography baked in from launch.
Bitcoin is the outlier — not because of technical incapacity, but because its decentralised governance turns any signature-scheme change into a multi-year process of proposal, review, testing and deployment. That process cannot begin in earnest until enough developers are working on it, and Galaxy's grant programme is a direct attempt to raise headcount. The pool of Bitcoin developers focused on quantum resistance is small; the pool of post-quantum cryptographers who understand Bitcoin's constraints is smaller still. An earlier fight over whether to freeze the 1.7 million BTC held in vulnerable legacy addresses showed how contested the governance side of this will be.
The threat surface is quantifiable. An estimated 1.7 million BTC (worth roughly $113 billion at current prices) sit in legacy pay-to-public-key addresses with keys visible on the ledger. Any address whose public key has been exposed by a prior spend faces the same risk. A machine running Shor's algorithm against those keys could derive private keys and forge signatures without triggering any on-chain check. No such machine exists yet, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology finalised its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, and a Trump executive order set 2031 as the federal deadline for post-quantum defence across US government systems. Bitcoin has no matching deadline.
Whether $5 million and an advisory council are enough to change that is a question about developer supply, not about intent. If Galaxy's grants successfully draw a dozen serious post-quantum contributors into Bitcoin core development, the initiative will have done its job. If applications are thin and the money sits unspent, the exercise becomes a signalling gesture. Applications are open. The counter is running.
