Charles Edwards, CEO of Capriole, warns that urgent measures must be taken.
According to other opinions, the current impact of quantum risk on bitcoin is minimal.
The investment and financial analysis company, Capriole Investments, warned on April 2, 2026, that the bitcoin (BTC) market has already applied a 24% discount on what would be its fair value. The same based on the proximity of the so-called Q-Day, that is, the day when a quantum computer can break the current cryptography of the Bitcoin network.
The warning from Charles Edwards, founder of the firm, comes a little more than a month after on February 20 of this year, he published a report warning that the digital asset was already reaching a 20% drop in its fair value; while explaining that the risk justified reducing the fair theoretical price from $120,000 per bitcoin to $96,000, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
Edwards points out that, if improvements are not implemented in algorithms resistant to quantum computing, The discount on Bitcoin could increase up to 40% in 2027 and reach 60% in 2028. This is because the network update, according to their calculations, would take around two years for the majority of users to adopt the changes. The focus is on the vulnerability of ECDSA, Bitcoin’s signature system, which would require approximately 2,300 logical qubits to be compromised using Shor’s algorithm.
The impact on the price of bitcoin and the divided reactions
On March 30, 2026, Google published a report claiming that a quantum computer could derive the private key of a Bitcoin wallet in less than approximately 10 minutes. Given the revelation, Edwards stressed that he had warned that the market was already pricing in quantum risk and demanding Bitcoin upgrade in 2026to avoid impacts on its value.
«This is the schedule I have been talking about for a long time. “This is why I have said for the last year that we MUST upgrade Bitcoin in 2026. This implies broad consensus within Bitcoin Core to enable the two-year implementation schedule,” Edwards said via x.
Capriole’s vision has some detractors. CoinShares, for example, has commented that only 10,200 BTC—less than 0.05% of the supply—face immediate real risk, calling the alarms exaggerated. In their estimates, they ensure that all analyzes that speak of more than 25% of the supply “at risk” usually include temporary exposures or exposures that can be mitigated through good practices, such as avoiding the reuse of addresses.
However, despite the active debate of the community, the Google paper determines that There is time available for a transition, but he warned that it is increasingly reduced with the improvement in quantum computing.