AmericanFortress has introduced a post-quantum signature scheme aimed at safeguarding existing crypto assets, including dormant wallets from the Satoshi era holding 1.1 million BTC. This was reported by CoinDesk.
The protocol involves a backward-compatible soft fork and the use of zero-knowledge proofs. The developers intend for this mechanism to freeze and protect vulnerable old-style Bitcoin addresses without requiring a mass migration of funds.
Specifically, this concerns BIP-32 addresses, including wallets linked to Satoshi Nakamoto.
AmericanFortress believes that once these coins are locked, the future of the assets can be determined by network governance. Among the options, company head Michal Pospieszalski mentioned transferring funds, burning them, or redistributing them.
This topic gained new momentum following a recent publication by Google Quantum AI. Researchers stated that many blockchains and cryptocurrencies still use ECDLP-256, and their assessments are directly applicable to secp256k1—the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Google added that post-quantum cryptography remains one of the most straightforward paths for long-term protection of such systems.
In this context, the Bitcoin community is already discussing various network protection options. One of these is BIP-360, which proposes a new type of Pay-to-Merkle-Root outputs.
The initiative's authors claim that this format retains functionality similar to Taproot while eliminating vulnerabilities to quantum attacks, such as key-path spending.
CoinDesk notes that AmericanFortress's proposal differs from similar initiatives. The company focuses not on new addresses but on existing, long-dormant wallets.
According to the developers, this approach will protect millions of coins without forcing owners to transfer their funds.
In May, AmericanFortress announced it had raised $8 million to develop quantum-resistant infrastructure for blockchains.
It is worth noting that on May 14, BNB Chain developers reported the results of testing the network's transition to post-quantum cryptography. The experiment confirmed the theoretical readiness of the blockchain for future threats but revealed a significant drop in performance.