That is why the most exposed institutional holders have been waiting. They await the coordination work, which a research grant cannot do. The work needs an actor with standing to convene the protocol communities, the guardians and the supervisory authorities, who must move together. No funded entity has taken on that role to the extent that Bitcoin requires.
The geopolitical race
Public funding fueled the offense. Every dollar put together for quantum hardware compresses the defense runway.
The day after the US announcement, Emmanuel Macron committed €1 billion to France’s quantum strategy and urged Europe to “change the scale” of investment, singling out the US and China as its rivals.
China had already sent about $17.5 billion through three regional venture funds before the US announcement landed; The US move now gives Beijing political cover to allow another round. That’s what a three-way industrial policy race looks like, and it just compressed everyone’s planning horizon, whether they were ready or not.
What will happen now
A serious response begins with a coordinated migration effort that begins before attack capability matures, because migration has a long tail and the runway just got shorter.
What is different about the post-quantum case is the scale of the coordination challenge. Bitcoin is uniquely exposed: Every address that has ever spent money has its public key sitting on the chain at the clear, forged moment that elliptic curve encryption breaks, with no way to remember it.
