BTC investor Nic Carter opined that BTC developers “are not doing anything.”
Back noted that Blockstream has a team of 20 people dedicated to crypto.
Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream, refuted the claim that Bitcoin developers are not working on the threat that quantum computing poses to the network. “It is simply false and insulting to say that Bitcoin protocol researchers are doing nothing,” he wrote on X on April 2.
Back further noted that Blockstream has a team of 20 people dedicated to applied cryptography and securityworking on quantum computing “basically full time,” and that that work is visible in the pace of research, implementations, and published improvement proposals.
Nic Carter, a renowned investor in the Bitcoin ecosystem, had stated in a interview in mid-February that Bitcoin developers “they are not doing anything” about it and that the solution would be to “fire the developers and put in new ones”a ruling that motivated Adam Back’s response.
The work Back refers to has a concrete and recent example that applies to Bitcoin. On March 30, Blockstream Research announced SHRIMPS, a quantum computer resistant digital signature Designed to work in multi-device environments. According to the whitepaper, it produces signatures of approximately 2,564 bytes, three times more compact than the post-quantum SLH-DSA standard approved by NIST in 2024.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, SHRIMPS joins SHRINCS, another Blockstream own scheme presented in December 2025 and tested in the Liquid Network, the Bitcoin sidechain operated by the company. However, none of these developments have a formal proposal in the official Bitcoin repository to be incorporated into the base layer.
How much time is left until Q-DAY?
The debate on urgency does not have a unified answer. Google announced that it is targeting 2029 to migrate its own infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography, a sign that several debate participants cited as a timeline reference.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, Google’s March 30 Quantum AI study reduced the quantum resources needed to break Bitcoin’s cryptography by almost 20 times, estimating that a quantum computer could compromise a public key in less than nine minutes with less than 500,000 physical qubits. That hardware doesn’t exist today, but the numbers are getting closer faster than projected.
Estimates of the term among the ecosystem leaders continue to be disparate. ARK Invest projects that the specific threat would arrive within a period of between 10 and 20 years, a figure also estimated by Adam Back. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, estimates that it could materialize in 2028.
The question of when the quantum threat will arrive has answers ranging from 2028 to two decades. The question of how to answer, for now, has none.