"If I'm focusing on blockchain, what's the single most valuable key? It's probably Tether's minting key," Smith said. He described a scenario where an attacker mints tokens from an administrative wallet and dumps them on the market before the issuer can respond. Smith also suggested that an attacker could frame the theft as an ordinary key loss, giving them a "plausible, deniable" cover story.
Sean Cheetham, a security researcher at Blockchain Capital, said exchange hot wallets are a more likely early target. Hitting those, he said, would avoid "ringing alarm bells" in the way that stealing Satoshi's coins would.
Related Article: Hong Kong Bank Secures 2.3 Out of 10 on New Quantum Safety Index
Experts Disagree on When Q-Day Arrives
Google moved its own post-quantum migration deadline to 2029 in March 2026, after an AI-assisted breakthrough showed elliptic-curve cryptography can be broken with fewer physical qubits than earlier models predicted. NGRAVE CEO Roy Blackstone said earlier threat models had failed to account for how quickly AI would advance alongside quantum hardware. "Most threat models assumed we had well into the next decade," Blackstone said, "but it did not account for how fast AI would develop alongside it."
Smith put the odds of Q-day arriving by 2028 at roughly 50-50, citing AI-driven improvements in quantum algorithms as a factor making predictions less stable. Cheetham said the early 2030s were "almost a certainty" for a cryptography-breaking quantum machine, while anything sooner carried "more of a trailing probability."
Michael Coates, chief information security officer at the Solana Foundation, declined to offer a specific estimate. He noted that the quantum threat had been described as "five years away" for more than a decade, but that continued uncertainty was still not a reason to delay preparation. Blackstone agreed, warning that the consequences of failing to migrate to post-quantum signatures would be "catastrophic."
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