A group of crypto organisations has launched the Quantum Alliance, an open standards body for protecting blockchains against future quantum computers.
Executives from nine organisations launched the group on Thursday. Named founding contributors include Quantus, Postquant Labs, Midnight Foundation, Keystone, Abelian and Hacken, covering base-layer protocols, privacy networks, rollups, hardware wallets and security auditing.
What the Alliance wants to do
The group says it will define what “quantum-ready” means, set criteria for judging claims that a network is quantum-resistant, and write compatibility rules for networks moving to new cryptography.
Its work will run through four working groups: blockchain migration, post-quantum zero-knowledge systems, wallet security and cross-chain compatibility.
How it will work
The Alliance is modelled on the Internet Engineering Task Force, the body that develops many of the internet’s core standards.
Proposals are meant to advance on public evidence and working implementations rather than company size or token holdings. All of its outputs will be published openly.
“In the future, ‘post-quantum cryptography’ will just be called ‘cryptography’ and everything else will be in a museum,” said Christopher Smith, founder and chief executive of Quantus.
The Bitcoin numbers
By the Alliance’s own count, about 6.04 million BTC, roughly 30% of supply, is exposed to a future quantum attack while sitting at rest.
A model co-built by two Alliance contributors points to March 2028 as an early window for that risk. A study by Google Quantum AI has cut the estimated number of qubits needed to break Bitcoin’s cryptography to under 500,000.
No machine can do that yet.
What happens next
The Alliance had not published a standard, timeline or first proposal at the time of writing. Its exposure estimate and the March 2028 window both come from its own members, and neither had been independently confirmed.
The test is whether larger networks and wallet makers adopt its criteria, or keep working on their own migration plans.
