Analyst: XRP Better Positioned Than Bitcoin Against Quantum Attacks

XRP’s exposure to future quantum attacks appears limited, with fewer than a handful of large dormant wallets at risk.

This is according to new on-chain analysis shared on April 8 that draws a sharp contrast with Bitcoin, where inactive “whale” holdings and legacy address types leave a wider surface area open if quantum computing advances.

XRP’s Dormant Wallets Show Limited Exposure

In a thread on X, researcher Vet said roughly 300,000 XRP accounts holding a combined 2.4 billion tokens have never made an outgoing transaction, meaning their public keys remain hidden and therefore resistant to quantum-based attacks.

By comparison, only two large XRP wallets holding about 21 million coins each have been inactive for more than five years, while also exposing their public keys.

“Dormant vulnerable XRP whales are almost nonexistent,” Vet wrote. “The rest is active and has their public key exposed but is also reasonable to expect to rotate keys if needed.”

This, they said, is very different from the Bitcoin network, which still has large dormant holdings such as the stash believed to belong to founder Satoshi Nakamoto, made up of more than 1 million BTC.

The distinction lies in how the XRP Ledger handles accounts, given that addresses on it do not expose their public keys until transactions are signed, unlike Bitcoin’s older pay-to-public-key format. This means that accounts that have never sent funds cannot be hit by attacks that rely on deriving private keys from public ones.

Even for active accounts, Vet argued that risk can be managed. The XRP Ledger supports signing key rotation, allowing users to update credentials without changing the underlying account. “It’s not a perfect solution,” they noted, adding that more advanced quantum-resistant cryptography may be adopted later.

Other developers in the thread, like Ripple engineer Mayukha Vadari, said the chain’s escrow mechanisms also offer additional safeguards. According to her, funds locked in escrow cannot be accessed before a set time, regardless of computing power. And while some edge cases remain, such as an attacker rendering an account unusable, the financial incentive to do so would be limited since the attacker cannot claim the funds.

“If you have any doubts just escrow your holdings,” Vadari advised.

Broader Quantum Concerns Remain Unresolved

Concerns about quantum computing and crypto security have gained traction recently, following a Google research paper published on March 31, which suggested that sufficiently advanced machines could break the private keys of major Ethereum and Bitcoin wallets in minutes, raising the possibility of attacks even before transactions are confirmed.

In addition, crypto analyst Udi Wertheimer argued in early April that the Lightning Network is structurally vulnerable because its payment channel design requires public keys to be shared with counterparties, leaving those keys exposed offline.

Efforts to address such risks are already underway, with Blockstream researchers saying they have deployed post-quantum signature schemes on a sidechain, allowing users to opt out into stronger protections without altering Bitcoin’s base protocol.