Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are accelerating preparations for a future quantum-computing threat as the United States increases support for quantum hardware. CoinDesk reports that the U.S. Commerce Department finalized CHIPS Act awards of up to $100 million each for Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum, potentially totaling $300 million, with the funding aimed at hardware scale, manufacturing and error-correction systems.
Ethereum has set December 2029 as an internal target for making its base layer quantum-resistant across execution, consensus and data. Bitcoin has no equivalent network-wide deadline, but developers are working on BIP-360, which proposes a post-quantum output type, and BIP-361, which outlines a phased migration away from current ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. Bitcoin researchers have also discussed 2029 as a period by which a credible migration path should exist.
That does not mean a machine capable of attacking Bitcoin or Ethereum is expected by 2029. The report cites a Google Quantum AI estimate that attacking 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography could require fewer than 1,200 error-corrected qubits, while announced IBM and Quantinuum systems for the end of the decade use different scales and metrics. Those figures are not directly comparable, but they explain why protocol teams do not want to wait for a cryptographically relevant machine to arrive.
The harder problem is migration across existing wallets, applications and already exposed public keys. Bitcoin proposals raise the possibility that legacy coins could eventually be stranded if owners fail to move them during a transition period. Ethereum faces a different coordination challenge: even after a base-layer upgrade, wallets, applications and users may need additional time to adopt new signature schemes.