President Donald Trump signed two quantum executive orders on Monday, setting a 2031 deadline for federal systems to adopt post-quantum cryptography and launching a national push for quantum computing. The orders directly address the 'harvest now, decrypt later' threat — the risk that adversaries are already storing encrypted data to crack with future quantum computers. For Bitcoin and Ethereum, which rely on elliptic-curve signatures, the clock is ticking.
A new timeline for post-quantum crypto
The first order accelerates the previous 2035 deadline set by the 2022 National Security Memorandum-10. Federal systems must now use post-quantum cryptography for key establishment by the end of 2030, and high-impact systems need to migrate digital signatures by the end of 2031. The Commerce Department and NIST are tasked with a pilot migration project, with a goal to convert federal systems by the end of 2027. CISA will support critical infrastructure operators through the transition.
That timeline builds on NIST's finalization of three post-quantum standards on August 13, 2024, including ML-DSA for digital signatures. The orders don't mandate anything for private networks or decentralized blockchains, but they signal the government's expectation that the rest of the economy will follow.
The threat to Bitcoin's keys
Bitcoin and Ethereum use elliptic-curve digital signatures. A sufficiently large quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could derive a private key from a public key — putting any coins with public keys on-chain at risk. A 2022 University of Sussex study estimated about 1.9 billion physical qubits are needed to break a Bitcoin key within the typical block window. For context, Google's Willow chip had only 105 qubits in December 2024. That gap is still enormous, but the orders reflect a judgment that the threat is real enough to start moving now.
Bitcoin contributors have already proposed a quantum migration plan and quantum-safe soft forks to adopt new standards. No timeline has been set for those upgrades, and the decentralized nature of the network means any change would require broad consensus.
No market panic — yet
Markets showed no immediate reaction. Bitcoin traded near $64,200 and Ethereum near $1,730 on Monday, each up about 1% over 24 hours. The orders set deadlines for government systems, not for decentralized networks, and the practical threat remains years away. Still, the U.S. established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in March 2025, giving the government a direct stake in the network's long-term security.
Next up: NIST and Commerce will publish the pilot migration plan, and CISA will roll out guidance for critical infrastructure. For the crypto industry, the question isn't whether to migrate — it's when, and how to coordinate without a central authority.
