Asia Morning Briefing: Michael Saylor Downplays BTC's Quantum Threat
- June 8, 2025
- Category:
Good Morning, Asia. Here's what's making news in the markets:
Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top stories during U.S. hours and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of U.S. markets, see CoinDesk's Crypto Daybook Americas.
BlackRock calls Quantum computers, with their ability to outperform classical binary computers and break traditional encryption, a threat to crypto .
So surely bitcoin BTC would price this in, as the threat of computers soon being able to break the encryption that enables the scarcity of bitcoin is an existential one.
But on a recent CNBC appearance, Strategy's Michael Saylor downplayed quantum's threat to BTC, arguing that the Bitcoin protocol would implement a software upgrade – just like any other tech company – when the threat becomes imminent.
"It's mainly marketing from people that want to sell you the next quantum yo-yo token," Saylor said on CNBC. "Google and Microsoft aren't going to sell you a computer that cracks modern cryptography because it would destroy Google and Microsoft – and the U.S. Government and the banking system."
Already, there are a number of proposals about how to secure Proof of Work against the quantum threat, including from BTQ , a startup building quantum-proof crypto hardware. One Bitcoin developer has put forward a draft Bitcoin Improvement Protocol that proposes a hard fork which would move everyone's wallets to quantum-secure addresses.
"Bitcoin is a protocol; the software gets upgraded every year," Saylor concluded, arguing that the bigger security threat for bitcoin is phishing.
Saylor's view isn't a universal one, however. A recent report from Presto Research argued that the crypto industry is "unprepared" for the coming quantum threat.
With BTC above $100K and the market getting ready to challenge another all-time high, traders just don't seem to be concerned.
With Circle's Blockbuster IPO, the True Market Size of Stablecoins Remains a Mystery
Circle (CRCL) recently had a blockbuster initial public offering, and is set to open the U.S. trading week Monday at over $107 – an impressive rally over its opening price of $69.
The number of stablecoins in circulation – the market cap of the asset category – is a well-known fact. Issuance can be seen on-chain after all, and that number comes in at $254 billion, according to CoinGecko data .
But figuring out the volume of stablecoins used in payments is a little trickier.
In a recent thread on X , Nic Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures and the cofounder of blockchain data aggregator Coinmetrics, parsed through the available data and found that there's a huge discrepancy in the numbers.