Quantum Attack Could Wipe 35% of BTC – Here’s Why XRP Holders Are Sleeping Better

A quantum attack powerful enough to break legacy cryptography could put nearly 35% of all Bitcoin at risk. That is a massive number. But for the XRP price and the people holding it, the story looks very different. 

CoinDesk shared that experts now estimate that only 0.03% of XRP’s total supply is vulnerable to the same threat. That gap explains why XRP holders are not losing sleep over Google’s latest quantum computing breakthroughs.

The Real Threat Hiding in Plain Sight

Every major blockchain relies on the same basic setup. You have a private key, your secret password, which you use to sign transactions. From that key, a public key gets derived, and from that public key, your wallet address gets generated. That is the standard cryptographic foundation across the board, as shared by CoinDesk.

The quantum vulnerability everyone is talking about comes from Shor’s algorithm. A machine powerful enough to run it could theoretically reverse engineer your private key from your public key. Then your funds are gone.

Here is the catch. Your public key only gets exposed to the network when you send a transaction. If you only receive funds and never send, your public key never appears on-chain. That simple difference changes everything.

Why XRP’s Numbers Look So Clean

This week, XRP Ledger validator Vet ran a quantum vulnerability audit across the entire ledger. He found around 300,000 XRP accounts holding 2.4 billion XRP that have never sent a single transaction. They have only received funds. Those accounts are quantum safe by default. 

The only real problems are dormant whale accounts that transacted years ago and exposed their public keys. Vet found exactly two such accounts on the entire XRP Ledger. 

Together, they hold 21 million XRP. That sounds like a lot, but against the total supply, it comes out to just 0.03%. That is nothing. The rest of the XRP price and its underlying supply is effectively immune to a quantum attack right now.

Read Also: Why It Could Be Dangerous to Be Bearish on XRP Right Now: Top Analyst

Bitcoin’s Much Bigger Problem

The quantum threat to Bitcoin looks far worse for two reasons. First, the scale. A huge chunk of early Bitcoin was mined using a format called P2PK, which exposed public keys directly in the transaction output. 

No spend transaction was even required. That includes Satoshi Nakamoto’s 1 million BTC, which has never moved. Google estimates that about 6.9 million BTC are vulnerable, nearly 35% of the entire circulating supply. Those are sitting ducks.

Second, Bitcoin lacks a key rotation feature. XRP has something called key rotation, which lets you swap your signing key without moving any funds. You can change the lock on your house without having to move out. That feature does not exist on Bitcoin. 

If a Bitcoin holder wants to protect their funds, they have to move everything to a new address. But during that move, the transaction sits in the memory pool for about ten minutes. A quantum machine could exploit that window. The risk is still theoretical, but the structural gap is real.

Why XRP Holders Are Fine

The XRP price itself is not directly tied to quantum risk, but the network’s design gives holders peace of mind. Ripple engineer Mayukha Vadari also pointed to the escrow feature as another defense. 

Funds locked in escrow with a time lock are safe because of logic, not cryptography. You simply cannot withdraw until a specific time passes. That does not make the account invincible, but it adds another layer of friction for any attacker.

None of this means Bitcoin is doomed. Developers are already working on quantum resistant proposals. But right now, the XRP price sits on a network where 99.97% of the supply is already safe. Bitcoin cannot say the same. 

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