Coinbase published a position paper urging the Bitcoin ecosystem to begin preparing for post-quantum security before quantum computers pose a real cryptographic threat. It argues that consensus changes, wallet upgrades and coordination could take years, leaving too little time for an orderly transition if work waits until a threat is confirmed.
The paper proposes a flexible output design that could accommodate new signature schemes without a full protocol redesign. For active wallets, Coinbase favors a staged approach that would let funds be spent with either a classical ECDSA key or a post-quantum key while holders migrate. It also says at least one post-quantum scheme must work with multi-party computation used in institutional custody, and calls for Bitcoin-specific testing of candidate signatures because other standards do not account for its block-space limits and long-lived signatures.
