Fixing the Quantum Issue on a Wallet Level

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to BTC 2026. How is everybody doing today?

​

My name is James Stephens. I'm founder and CEO of Feral Technologies and Crown Network, the creators of the Qastle Wallet.

​

I want to start off today the way I usually do. If you have a phone or mobile device in your pocket, whether you are taking pictures, videos, whatever you are doing, put that in the air for me real quick. Keep them up. If that device holds a wallet, digital assets, access to your financial login, whatever it may be, keep your hands raised. Do not put them down.

​

Those of you who still have them raised, look around. What you see in this room is not just people. You are not just seeing phones. What you are seeing is one of the greatest threats to financial security that we know. What you see is a user endpoint that is going to be unsecured very soon.

​

I have 15 minutes to tell you about this, but it is not just a room of people here. This attack that I am about to talk about at the wallet level, the quantum attack on a wallet, does not attack banks first. It attacks this: the wallets, the keys.

​

The real risk for Bitcoin is in the keys. Bitcoin itself is a protocol, and we know that is not the problem. The problem is the keys. The encryption that we used to think was impenetrable can now be decrypted, harvested, whatever you want to call it. But that is no longer enough.

​

Today, I am going to walk you through it. I am going to talk about some of the critical issues as well, not just where the vulnerabilities exist, but where the solution is and where we must begin.

​

Bitcoin was built on cryptography that really stood the test of time. It was never really built to withstand quantum, though. That is why we are talking about this today. That is why you are starting to hear the buzzword quantum all over the place.

​

At the core of Bitcoin security is elliptic curve cryptography, what we call ECDSA. With quantum computing, algorithms like Shor's algorithm, among others, introduce a new reality that we were not really ready for at the time. The moment a public key is exposed, with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, the system can derive the private key that you thought was impenetrable, and that cryptographers at the time thought was impenetrable. But that was at that time. It could be broken.

​

That is not a network attack. It is not a mining attack. That is a wallet attack. There is a big difference there. When we talk about what the protocol is exposed to as opposed to what the keys are exposed to, it is quite a big difference.

​

It was not that long ago that standards bodies were talking about 2040 or 2045 as the time when this would be broken. It was something we did not really have to worry about. That is not true. If you notice, standards bodies and others have moved that ahead.

​

Institutions like the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been preparing for this for years. The problem is that they did not realize how fast quantum would take off. We only understand what quantum allows us to understand. I say that all the time. People ask, what is one of the scariest things about quantum? One of the scariest things is that we are only allowed to understand what it allows us to, because every new breakthrough, every new article, every new benchmark or standard changes that threat factor.

​

There is a global initiative to replace the cryptography we use today. They selected and standardized different types of techniques and algorithms. The industry is already moving ahead with this. The cryptographic systems that we rely on today are on a path to being deprecated by 2029 to 2030. At a time when it used to be 2045 or 2050, now we are down about 20 years. That is not speculation. That is direction, and that is evident by the continuous changes we see in the standards.

​

A lot of you have come up to me, DM'd me, and asked what I think about the Google announcement. The Google announcement was that it takes 20 times fewer qubits to break certain cryptography, like private keys, than we originally thought.

​

Personally, I think that is going to move faster. I do not think it is going to slow down. I think it is only going to move faster. They demonstrated that the cryptography used in systems like Bitcoin could take far fewer resources to break, and that was a very scary moment. It was a moment of realization.

​

They realized that public keys we see can be harvested, and that is called harvest now, decrypt later. What happens with that is attackers take the public key information and hold it. They store that, not for you, but for them. Then, once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer comes along, millions of those keys are exposed.

​

This is not going to come riding in on a horse with trumpets or anything like that. It is going to be powerful. It is going to be quiet. It is going to be lethal. The moment quantum systems become powerful enough, we are going to know it, but we are going to know it in a very ugly way. There will be no countdown, no announcements, nothing like that. Once that line is crossed, everything exposed becomes vulnerable.

​

Harvest now, decrypt later is already happening.

​

Wallets are ground zero because they are the entry point and the edge point that make them much easier to attack than the protocol level. We have spent years focusing on securing blockchains, but Bitcoin does not fail at the protocol level. It gets compromised at the edges. That is where it exploits weak entropy, key generation flaws, and user-side vulnerabilities.

​

If quantum breaks anything first, the first thing it will break is the point where the keys are created, where they are stored, and where they are used. What that means is the future of Bitcoin security is not just on chain. It is in your pocket.

​

Many of you, probably about 90% of you today, raised your phones and said, I have a wallet on my phone. I have a digital app on my phone. I am connected to my bank. Guess what? You just held the most vulnerable thing you could have in the history of mankind with regard to financial infrastructure.

​

So let us talk about the fix, the layers of defense.

​

We ask ourselves, how do we fix it? I get that all the time. James, how are we going to fix this? The first thing is called PQC, post-quantum cryptography. We are going to move beyond elliptic curves. You are going to adopt algorithms like Kyber, Dilithium, and SPHINCS+. Crown also has proprietary security architecture as well.

​

A lot of people say that is theoretical, but it is not theoretical. These are being standardized. When we look at different standardizations, Kyber, Dilithium, and SPHINCS+ are on that list. As they move up through FIPS, they are continuing to add more and more of these algorithms.

​

The next thing is true entropy. What is entropy? Entropy is the randomness that happens when you are trying to secure keys or numbers, or whatever it may be. That is tied to what is called a QRNG, a quantum random number generator. True entropy at the quantum level cannot be guessed at. It cannot be figured out, because it is as random as the universe itself.

​

I also want to talk about pseudo-random generation no longer being enough. Many of the security architectures that are used now say, we have a random number generator, or whatever it may be. They do not. They are pseudo-random. The vast majority of them are pseudo-random, meaning they may be random, but they are not as random as what true entropy and a QRNG can give you. We will talk about that with our partners at Quantum eMotion in just a minute.

​

Why does true entropy matter? True entropy strengthens wallet security from the moment the keys are created. It secures it from the moment it is created all the way through. In other words, no one can guess what that key is going to be when it creates its entropy.

​

Crown partnered with Quantum eMotion, led by my friend and colleague, Dr. Francis. He is the CEO there, an incredible leader in the quantum encryption space. They continue to lead by example, because they came up with QRNG2 technology, which creates completely random number generation. It cannot be broken.

​

We have integrated true quantum random number generation into the security that we do. That is why we partnered with them, and we are very happy to be on the team there.

​

Now I want to talk about Qastle Wallet. This is why we built Qastle. Crown and Quantum eMotion came together in a partnership. It is not just another wallet. It is one of the most advanced quantum-secured architectures for self custody that I have ever seen, and I think anywhere in the world today.

​

It has cryptographic frameworks that we built based on what the threat vector was for the future. It is also powered by QRNG2 technology with Quantum eMotion. It has multi-layer authentication on top of that, and it is designed for the real world.

​

We went through and looked at it and said, what does the threat landscape look like? How can we mitigate the type of attacks that are happening right now and in the future? We put all of that together when we built Qastle. We started from the foundation and said, we are going to put this here, we are going to put this here, and we have many different layers. They all sit in Qastle at the strength of what they do, whether it is a Dilithium signature, QRNG, key generation, whatever it may be. That is what Qastle was built for.

​

It was not built because it was trendy. It was built because we saw where this was going. We made a decision to build something that really closed that gap of security. That is where Qastle came in.

​

The one thing that we always make sure we do is say: we build it right, we build it secure, and we build it ready.

​

Bitcoin represents sovereignty. It represents freedom and ownership. But sovereignty without security is just exposure. That is where we need to understand where we are going with it.

​

We are entering a new era where the question is no longer just, how can you hold on to your keys? The question is, how can you protect your keys? Can you protect them against what is coming?

​

The future of Bitcoin security and the blockchain sector is not going to be decided at the protocol level, like we talked about. It is going to be decided at the wallet level. That is the scariest part for all of us.

​

I want to take a minute to say thank you to every single person here today. Thank you to the Bitcoin Conference team for creating this platform. I want to personally recognize the Crown Network team, who is here in attendance today as well, and the engineers, developers, and visionaries that we have worked with on multiple networks. Thank you to all of them.

​

We are not here just to participate in the future. We are here to build it. The work that we do right now, and the decisions that we make today, will define what security looks like for the next generation. That is the entire purpose of Qastle Wallet and what Crown Network is doing.

​

Again, let us build it right, let us build it secure, and let us move forward with that. I appreciate you all.

​

If you are here today and you hold Crown, if you are one of the Crownies, I know you guys are here. I see a lot of you here today. There is one question, one slogan that we always use, and I have to ask: what is in your bag?

​

Thank you so much, everyone. Come see us at the booth and learn more about Qastle. Thank you again.