Europol published two reports on October 7 warning about the quantum threat targeting public key cryptography used in cryptocurrency wallets. NIST plans to deprecate current cryptographic configurations by 2030 and retire classical public key cryptography by 2035, while Google aims for a fault-tolerant machine by 2029. A study cited estimates that migrating all Bitcoin UTXOs would require at least 76 days of continuous downtime, with a post-quantum signature occupying approximately 20 KB versus 72 bytes for ECDSA. Europol also warns against the “harvest now, decrypt later” strategy, where attackers collect encrypted data now betting on future quantum power, though no documented case is currently known to Europol.
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