Coinbase advisory board says quantum computing threat is on the horizon, crypto needs a plan

A new report commissioned by Coinbase sounds a cautious, but urgent, alarm: Quantum computing won't break crypto tomorrow, but the industry can’t afford to wait.

The 50-page paper, authored by an independent advisory board that includes prominent cryptographers and academics like Dan Boneh of Stanford University, Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation and Sreeram Kannan of Eigen Labs, concludes that while today’s blockchains remain secure, a future “fault-tolerant quantum computer” capable of breaking widely used encryption is increasingly plausible, and preparation must begin now.

In recent months, concerns around quantum risk have moved further into the mainstream. Google researchers have published estimates suggesting that a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could one day break Bitcoin’s cryptography.

Major crypto ecosystems have already started mapping out their responses. The Ethereum Foundation has proposed new types of digital signatures that are designed to be safe against quantum computers, while Solana and others are experimenting with quantum-resistant wallet designs.

The report stresses that current quantum machines are far from powerful enough to crack the cryptography underpinning Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks. Breaking standard encryption would require vast computational overhead, a milestone still considered a major engineering challenge.

Still, the authors caution against complacency.

“We have high confidence that a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer will eventually be built,” the report states, adding that the timeline is uncertain but “clearly on the horizon.”

That uncertainty is exactly the problem, with estimates ranging from “a few years to a decade or more” and no reliable way to predict breakthroughs.

The urgency is reflected in guidance from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which recommends migrating to quantum-resistant cryptography by 2035, a timeline the report suggests may even prove optimistic.

“Waiting for it to be urgent is not a good idea,” the Coinbase paper says, emphasizing that transitions across blockchains, wallets and exchanges could take years to execute safely.