Michael Saylor’s firm Strategy has teamed up with eight major Wall Street and crypto institutions to channel $15m over three years into shoring up Bitcoin’s defences, with emerging quantum computing threats identified as the first priority.
The new Bitcoin Security Consortium was unveiled in a Strategy press release, with Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets and Galaxy Digital named as fellow founding members.
Drawn from across the institutional Bitcoin ecosystem, the group brings together spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers, custodians and infrastructure specialists. BlackRock, Fidelity and ARK Invest all run spot Bitcoin ETFs, Anchorage Digital and Coinbase provide custody services, while Block, Blockstream and Galaxy Digital operate businesses centred on Bitcoin infrastructure and related financial products.
Decentralised funding, coordinated agenda
Rather than pooling the $15m into a single fund, Strategy said each member will independently decide which developers, researchers and organisations receive its share. The intention is to allow firms to back different security projects while still coordinating their overall efforts under the consortium’s umbrella.
Day‐to‐day coordination will be handled by Brink Executive Director Mike Schmidt, who will serve in the role on a volunteer basis, according to Strategy. Anticipating questions about his independence, Schmidt stressed on X that he will not be paid by the group and will continue to run Brink separately from any of the founding companies.
“I continue to run Brink, independent of any Consortium member. I’ve committed to a year in this role, maybe I’d do two, but ultimately I see it as a seat that should rotate to other participants over time. My commitment is to Bitcoin, and that doesn’t change.”
Under its initial mandate, the consortium will direct funding towards developers and researchers already working on Bitcoin security, with “quantum readiness” set as the first area of focus, Strategy said. Schmidt added that other classes of security projects could be financed later if the opening phase proves successful.
Protocol‐level decisions will remain outside the consortium’s remit. In his X post, Schmidt underlined that the group will not take collective positions on proposed Bitcoin upgrades. Members will retain full control over where their individual grants go, while developers will continue to use the existing open review and governance processes on the network.
Galaxy’s parallel $5m quantum readiness programme
Galaxy Digital had already committed separate funding to quantum‐related work before joining the consortium. As crypto.news reported earlier this week, the firm has opened applications for a $5m Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative, targeting grants for quantum‐resistant signature schemes, wallet migration tools and independent security audits.
Galaxy has argued that deploying post‐quantum protections across Bitcoin would demand years of collaboration between Bitcoin Core developers, exchanges, wallet providers, infrastructure firms and end users. Its grant programme invites other institutions to add both capital and research support to the effort.
Taken together, Galaxy’s standalone initiative and the consortium pledge put $20m behind the two disclosed quantum‐focused programmes. The commitments are formally separate, however, because Strategy’s consortium structure leaves each member in charge of its own grant‐making decisions.
Quantum threat seen as distant but potentially vast
The firms and researchers involved say future quantum computers could endanger Bitcoin if they reach the point of breaking the elliptic curve cryptography that secures Bitcoin wallets. Galaxy has noted that today’s quantum machines are incapable of mounting such an attack and that most experts do not foresee an immediate threat.
Even with an uncertain timetable, Galaxy maintains that work must begin early because rolling out and adopting new protections on the Bitcoin network could take many years. Its priorities include alternative digital signature algorithms, tools to help users move funds into more secure wallets, and audits designed to stress‐test proposed defences.
Research from CryptoQuant, cited by Galaxy, estimated that roughly 6.9 million BTC could be exposed if a sufficiently advanced quantum computer compromised Bitcoin’s current cryptography. Based on market prices at the time of its announcement, Galaxy put the notional value of those potentially vulnerable coins at about $461bn.
Citi has arrived at a similar figure, according to an earlier crypto.news report, calculating that between 6.5 million and 6.9 million BTC already have public keys visible on‐chain. That pool of coins is seen by researchers as more susceptible to a future quantum attack.
Lost or inaccessible wallets add another layer of risk, because their owners would be unable to move coins to addresses protected by upgraded cryptography. Quantus warned in a previously reported assessment that quantum development may be progressing faster than earlier projections, raising the prospect that dormant holdings could be left without a realistic migration path.
Market reaction and perceived ‘quantum discount’
Concerns about the quantum timeline have started to feature in some Bitcoin valuation models. As crypto.news reported in early June, Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards argued that Bitcoin was trading at a 28% “quantum discount” relative to his modelled trajectory towards $120,000.
At the time Edwards presented his model, Bitcoin was trading around $62,099 following a sharp sell‐off. He attributed the apparent discount to investor anxiety over what he described as slow movement among Bitcoin Core developers on planning for post‐quantum signatures.
Prediction markets suggest traders are less alarmed about the near‐term risk. Data from Polymarket put the probability of quantum computing breaking Bitcoin by December 2027 at 14%.
With Strategy now coordinating institutional participation through the consortium and Galaxy already accepting grant applications, researchers working on Bitcoin security are set to gain additional resources well before quantum computers pose a proven threat. The consortium’s early challenge will be to demonstrate that independently managed grants can deliver practical security tools without exerting undue influence over Bitcoin’s protocol governance.
