Tech

Share

Share this article

Bitcoin’s post-quantum migration will be harder than Taproot and needs to start now, Project Eleven CEO says

Alex Pruden said the asymmetry between acting on a post-quantum signature scheme today and waiting for certainty about quantum-computing hardware timelines means Bitcoin developers should move from research into production.

By Jeffrey Albus|Edited by Nikhilesh De

May 6, 2026, 10:14 p.m. 3 min read

Make preferred on

What to know:

• Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference Wednesday that Bitcoin’s developer community should move from research into production on a post-quantum signature option rather than waiting for certainty about quantum-computer timelines.
• He said the migration will be substantially harder than Taproot, which took roughly five years and remained opt-in, because every bitcoin user, wallet and exchange will need to participate in a post-quantum migration to stay secure.
• Asked for his personal view, Pruden said recycling dormant quantum-vulnerable coins back into Bitcoin’s supply curve would put him “overall” on the confiscation side, though he stressed the community and market would ultimately decide.

Pruden said the asymmetry between acting now and waiting favors action.

“We added some new cryptography, we kind of built in this optionality, it turns out we didn’t need quite yet, but at least we have it,” he said, describing the worst case of moving early.

The worst case of moving late is far worse: a sufficiently capable quantum computer could derive private keys from any exposed public key using Shor’s algorithm, the 1994 algorithm that remains the canonical example of what a quantum machine can do that a classical one cannot.

Pruden valued the asset at stake at roughly $2.3 trillion.

“In a very real sense, someone with a sufficiently large and capable quantum computer kind of owns everyone’s digital assets or bitcoin for the public key that they can see,” Pruden said.

The path forward, Pruden said, is to introduce a new signature scheme into Bitcoin that does not rely on the classical math underlying the elliptic-curve digital signature algorithm, or ECDSA, it uses today.