The G7 cybersecurity working group, chaired by France's ANSSI, urged governments and businesses on Sept. 3 to begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography, a transition that pressures Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana to harden the signature schemes securing wallets and transactions.
The G7 cybersecurity working group on Sept. 3 called on governments and businesses to begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography now, warning that encrypted data harvested today could be decrypted once sufficiently powerful quantum computers emerge.
"Although the exact timeline is uncertain, several recent advances suggest an anticipation of the development of quantum computers able to break widely used public-key cryptography mechanisms and threaten the security of digital infrastructures," the group wrote in a report chaired by France's National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, under the country's 2026 G7 presidency.
The document, signed by the cybersecurity agencies of all seven members — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US — plus the EU Commission and ENISA, reframes the quantum threat from a distant problem to a near-term one. It sets out five priorities: raising awareness, developing national PQC strategies, focusing research on practical solutions, building public-private partnerships, and integrating PQC into procurement requirements. ANSSI separately said it will stop vetting products that lack quantum-safe encryption starting in 2027, with post-quantum security becoming mandatory in procurement of some security products by 2030.
The report does not name cryptocurrency, but the same class of public-key cryptography protects blockchain wallets and authorizes transactions. That makes the G7 timeline a de facto compliance clock for networks whose governance was built on the assumption that current signatures would hold indefinitely.
Bitcoin developers are weighing BIP-360, a proposal that would prepare the network to support new signature schemes. Current quantum computers cannot break Bitcoin's cryptography, but any major security change requires broad support from developers, miners, businesses, and users, and holders would need a way to move funds from vulnerable addresses without disrupting the network.
The coordination burden is the core migration risk. Unlike a centralized service that can push an update, Bitcoin's change process demands consensus across a fragmented set of stakeholders, which historically has made protocol-level security upgrades slow to land.
Ethereum researchers are planning replacements for several cryptographic components used by accounts, validators, and applications. One recent proposal would rebuild Ethereum's deposit contract to support the larger keys required by post-quantum systems, a change that touches the validator onboarding stack.
Solana may have a simpler path because it uses EdDSA signatures, researchers have said. The Solana Foundation has tested post-quantum signatures on a test network and introduced an optional hash-based vault for protecting funds, giving it a working prototype ahead of its larger peers.
The divergence in readiness shapes how each network prices migration risk. Solana's optional vault and testnet work give it a head start, while Bitcoin's decentralized governance and Ethereum's validator stack face longer coordination timelines. If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer arrives before those transitions complete, funds in legacy addresses could be exposed — a scenario the G7 report argues justifies acting before the threat is confirmed.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
