VanEck CEO Sounds Alarm on Bitcoin’s Long-Term Viability Amid Quantum Threats

Jan van Eck, CEO of asset-management giant VanEck, has issued a stark warning about an under-discussed risk facing Bitcoin: the looming threat of quantum computing to its cryptographic foundations.

Speaking on a recent broadcast, van Eck emphasized that the challenges confronting Bitcoin extend far beyond price volatility. “There’s something else going on within the Bitcoin community that non-crypto people need to know about,” he said. Highlighting his firm’s long history—VanEck was founded decades before Bitcoin’s creation—he added: “Ultimately, VanEck has been around before Bitcoin. We will walk away from Bitcoin if we think the thesis is fundamentally broken.”The core concern centers on Bitcoin’s reliance on elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), which could be rendered obsolete by sufficiently powerful quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm. Such machines would be capable of deriving private keys from public keys in minutes, effectively breaking the security of virtually all existing Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been vocal on this front, bluntly stating that “elliptic curves are going to die” once scalable quantum computers arrive.

Adding urgency to the debate, Scott Aaronson, a leading quantum computing researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, recently suggested that a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of executing Shor’s algorithm at scale could emerge before the 2028 U.S. presidential election—potentially years earlier than many in the crypto industry have assumed.

In light of these risks, VanEck is actively exploring privacy-focused alternatives such as Zcash, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) that some researchers believe may offer greater resistance to quantum attacks in the medium term.

While Bitcoin advocates argue that post-quantum cryptographic upgrades can be implemented via soft or hard forks before the threat materializes, van Eck’s comments underscore a growing unease among institutional players: if quantum progress outpaces migration efforts, the world’s largest cryptocurrency could face an existential crisis unrelated to market sentiment or regulatory pressure.