The Group of Seven's cybersecurity working group has issued an urgent call for governments and businesses to begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography now, warning that quantum computing represents a security and economic threat to public and private organizations. The report, “Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action,” was released on September 3, 2026, and urges coordinated planning, national PQC strategies, and public-private research partnerships.
While the report does not explicitly mention cryptocurrency, its findings directly affect crypto networks, exchanges, and custodians. Blockchain wallets and transaction authorizations rely on the same class of public-key cryptography that quantum computers could eventually break. The G7 highlighted a “harvest now, decrypt later” risk, in which encrypted data stolen today could be decrypted once sufficiently powerful quantum machines emerge.
Europe has already set deadlines: the EU's Coordinated Implementation Roadmap for the Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography appeared in June 2025, and the European Commission expects member states to begin transitioning by the end of 2026, with high-risk systems migrating before 2030.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana developers are actively exploring defenses. Bitcoin's BIP-360, also known as Pay-to-Merkle-Root, is being considered as a soft-fork proposal to reduce long-term quantum vulnerability, though it has no activation date and would require broad support from developers, miners, businesses, and users. Ethereum researchers are planning to upgrade multiple cryptographic components, including BLS validator signatures, KZG commitments, ECDSA account signatures, and application-layer zero-knowledge proofs. In his February 2026 roadmap, Vitalik Buterin identified those areas, with core post-quantum infrastructure targeted for 2029. Solana may have a simpler path because it uses EdDSA signatures; the Solana Foundation has already tested post-quantum signatures on a test network and introduced an optional hash-based vault.
The migration is not cheap. Current secp256k1 ECDSA signatures are about 64 bytes, while post-quantum alternatives such as ML-DSA-87 can be around 4,627 bytes, increasing storage, bandwidth, and transaction costs. NIST has proposed phasing out 112-bit ECDSA after 2030 and forbidding ECDSA after 2035. Google Quantum AI has also argued that breaking 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography may be less resource-intensive than previously assumed, and Google plans to complete its own systems migration by 2029.
The G7 concluded that public and private organizations must act jointly now, making the transition to PQC “the key foundation to help build a secure and resilient digital future.”
