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Quantum computing is not yet powerful enough to break Bitcoin’s cryptography. But the window for preparing defenses is narrowing, and the crypto industry knows it. The question is not whether to act but how, and a growing number of teams are now placing very different bets on the answer.
QuFi Network, a post-quantum infrastructure company, entered that race this week with a verification platform it claims can shield digital assets from future quantum threats without requiring any changes to existing blockchain settlement networks. Alongside the platform, QuFi launched uBTC, a proof-of-concept applying the system to Bitcoin and currently running on Bitcoin Testnet4.
The Architecture: Verification Moves Off-Chain, Settlement Stays Put
The core idea behind QuFi’s approach is a deliberate separation of two functions that blockchains currently bundle together: verifying that a transaction is legitimate, and actually settling it on-chain. QuFi proposes to handle verification through its own decentralized node network, which applies post-quantum cryptographic checks before any transaction reaches the underlying blockchain for settlement.
For uBTC specifically, the system verifies Bitcoin collateral and generates cryptographic proofs that govern how value moves between settlement environments. When a user redeems, the final step still settles as a standard Bitcoin transaction, meaning the Bitcoin network itself sees nothing unusual.
The platform relies on three post-quantum cryptographic standards: ML-DSA-65, SLH-DSA, and ML-KEM-1024. These cover digital signatures and secure key exchange and are drawn from the same family of algorithms that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology standardised in 2024 after years of evaluation.
The practical motivation for keeping quantum-resistant logic off the base layer is straightforward. Post-quantum signatures are significantly larger than the elliptic-curve signatures Bitcoin currently uses, and embedding them directly on-chain would increase storage demands, bandwidth consumption, and computational overhead for every node on the network. QuFi argues its external verification layer sidesteps those costs while still delivering the cryptographic protection.
A Crowded Field With No Settled Consensus
QuFi is not operating in isolation. The broader crypto ecosystem has been accelerating its quantum-readiness work throughout 2025, and the approaches on the table reveal genuine disagreement about where the fix should live.
In August, StarkWare demonstrated a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction on mainnet without requiring a protocol fork. The result was a proof of concept with a steep price: the transaction took hours of computation and cost roughly USD 150 to USD 200, and its non-standard format meant it had to be submitted directly to a miner rather than broadcast through normal channels. That is not a viable user experience at scale, but it confirmed the technical possibility.
The same month, a coalition of banks and regulators across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia ran a pilot testing post-quantum wallets and on-chain transfers using ML-DSA-65, the same standard QuFi has incorporated. That pilot signals institutional appetite for quantum-resistant infrastructure, even if the precise implementation path remains open.
On the Ethereum side, the Ethereum Foundation made a notable reversal in August, dropping the Poseidon hash function from its planned post-quantum architecture in favour of more established alternatives such as SHA and BLAKE. Poseidon had been favoured for its efficiency inside zero-knowledge proof systems, but concerns about its security maturity prompted the change.
Bitcoin developers are pursuing a protocol-level route through a proposal called SHRINCS, published in August by Blockstream researchers. SHRINCS is an experimental post-quantum signature scheme designed to reduce the size and performance costs that come with quantum-resistant signatures. It does this through stateful signatures, which require wallets to track previously used signing keys. The scheme has no completed security proof yet, and its design introduces complexity and potential failure modes for users who mismanage key state. It remains early-stage, but it represents the kind of native protocol change that QuFi’s external-layer approach is explicitly designed to avoid.
Why This Matters Beyond the Technical Debate
For investors and businesses in Malaysia and Singapore holding Bitcoin or building on blockchain infrastructure, the quantum threat is still distant but the preparation window is not. Cryptographic transitions take years to deploy at scale, and the choices made now about architecture will shape what is and is not compatible with future-proof systems.
QuFi’s external verification model has an obvious appeal: it promises protection without waiting for Bitcoin’s notoriously slow governance process to approve a protocol change, and without the user-experience costs that current on-chain quantum-resistant transactions carry. The trade-off is trust. An external verification layer introduces a new set of nodes and a new set of assumptions about their honesty and reliability, which is precisely the kind of dependency that Bitcoin’s design was built to eliminate.
Whether that trade-off is acceptable depends on what threat model you are preparing for and how much you trust the interim infrastructure. QuFi’s uBTC is still on testnet, and the platform has not yet demonstrated how its node network handles adversarial conditions or what happens if the verification layer is compromised while settlement continues normally on Bitcoin.
The broader race to quantum-proof crypto is real, the urgency is legitimate, and multiple credible approaches are now being tested in parallel. What the industry has not yet produced is a solution that is simultaneously secure, scalable, decentralised, and ready for mainstream use. QuFi’s launch adds a meaningful entry to that competition, but the finish line is still some distance away.
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