Gartner estimates that conventional public-key cryptography may become unsafe as early as 2030 because of quantum computing. Bitcoin developers have two proposals on the table, BIP-360 and SHRINCS, but neither fully solves the problem yet.
Conventional asymmetric cryptography may become unsafe as early as 2030 because of advances in quantum computing, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.
BIP-360 covers only part of the risk
BIP-360 is the network's quantum-resistant proposal, and it introduces the new Pay-to-Merkle-Root address type. However, it remains a proposal and is not quantum-proof.
The proposal removes the Taproot key-path spending option, which exposes the public key on-chain. That addresses a particular kind of long-exposure risk, but it is not a full solution, and BIP-360 does not migrate existing coins automatically.
It also leaves a gap. A transaction exposes its public key before confirmation, while it sits in the mempool, and the proposal offers no protection in that window.
SHRINCS tries to keep signatures small
Bitcoin's current signature schemes, ECDSA and Schnorr, produce very compact signatures. The National Institute of Standards and Technology recommends post-quantum secure hash and lattice-based schemes whose signatures are 38 to 123 times bigger. If employed, they would slow the network to a crawl and drop transactions per second to under 1.
SHRINCS, unveiled in December 2025, is a potentially viable alternative. Its signatures start at 548 bytes and can grow to 4,619 bytes.
The scheme is a promising research field but not yet cryptographically mature. It brings compact signatures, yet it also introduces a cryptographic state-management problem into every wallet.
The scheme also carries trade-offs, and a single update is not enough to achieve quantum resistance.
Source: AMBCrypto
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