CoinShares, the fourth-largest digital asset manager globally with over $10 billion in assets under management, has challenged the narrative that bitcoin faces an imminent quantum computing crisis. The firm's Saturday report argues that only a small fraction of bitcoin supply is realistically vulnerable to quantum-enabled key extraction.

CoinShares estimates about 1.6 million BTC, or roughly 8% of total supply, sits in legacy Pay-to-Public-Key addresses where public keys are permanently visible on-chain. However, the firm contends that only about 10,200 BTC would be large enough to create "appreciable market disruption" if stolen. The remaining coins are distributed across more than 32,000 unspent transaction outputs averaging around 50 BTC each.

Breaking bitcoin's cryptography would require fault-tolerant quantum systems roughly 100,000 times more powerful than today's largest machines, placing the threat at least a decade away. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet noted that Google's Willow is a 105-qubit machine, while key-breaking would require millions of qubits. CoinShares endorsed a gradual transition to post-quantum signatures, framing quantum risk as a foreseeable engineering problem rather than an emergency.