Quantum-Safe Wallets, No Moving Day
Institutions, developers, and regulators are racing to assess and implement post-quantum cryptographic protections for Bitcoin and broader crypto infrastructure.
Blockchain security firm AmericanFortress published a proposal, ZK-PoSP, that it says would protect existing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana wallets from future quantum attacks without users moving funds or changing addresses. Coverage tied the pitch to roughly $470 billion in vulnerable Bitcoin, including Satoshi-era coins. The paper notes the scheme's quantum resistance is conjectural and would require network-level upgrades to take effect.
Quantum wallets: two teams, one trick, same wall
Last week I covered Project Eleven's quantum-recovery tool for Bitcoin, built on a neat piece of math: a quantum computer might crack the key that spends your coins, but it can't reconstruct the seed phrase that key was derived from — so proving you know the seed, without revealing it, is something only the real owner can do. Now a second team, blockchain security firm AmericanFortress, has published a proposal built on exactly the same idea. When independent groups converge on one design, that usually means the realistic options have narrowed to it.
The difference is where the proof kicks in. Project Eleven's version is a safety net: migrate your coins during a window, and if you miss it, your funds freeze until you unfreeze them with a proof. AmericanFortress goes further — no migration, no freeze for ordinary wallets. Your address and coins stay put, and instead of authorizing payments with a normal signature (the exact thing a quantum attacker would exploit), your wallet spends by proving it knows the seed, which never touches the network. If it works, moving day is cancelled entirely.
The wall is the same one from last week, though, and this proposal doesn't climb it. Every computer running Bitcoin would need to upgrade to accept the new proofs — and Bitcoin has no CEO; changes happen when thousands of independent operators agree, over years. The paper is an unreviewed preprint whose own text calls the quantum-resistance conjectural rather than proven. It's patent-pending, which sits badly on a network allergic to anyone owning the rules. And Satoshi-era coins — the headline $470 billion — predate seed phrases, so there's no seed to prove; AmericanFortress's answer for those is the same freeze-and-vote that made BIP-361 radioactive. As I noted then: for pre-seed coins, every clever scheme collapses back to freeze-only.
So the scoreboard after two proposals: the cryptography is converging, and it's the easy part. The permission — and the oldest coins — remain exactly as stuck as they were.
2 sources
- AmericanFortress proposes quantum-safe crypto wallet protection without fund migration · cointelegraph.com · T1
- AmericanFortress unveils new post-quantum scheme to protect $470 billion in Bitcoin · en.coin-turk.com · T2