Lord of the Things

Today the OCC approved a national trust company charter for Coinbase despite significant concerns about whether the bank's proposed activities are consistent with law. National trust company activities are meant to be limited because these institutions are subject to substantially less regulation than full-service banks.

The latest quantum papers from Google and Caltech are an important signal for the industry. Timelines are still debated, but the time to act is now. The good news: post-quantum cryptography exists. This is a solvable problem, and many chains already have roadmaps. Bitcoin needs to catch up though. The bad news: post-quantum cryptography is relatively new and it would be fairly easy to create new security risks if implementation is rushed. The industry needs to align on what happens to wallets that fail to migrate before a CRQC appears. At Coinbase, we’ve been working on this for a while, auditing and upgrading our internal infrastructure, researching post-quantum cryptography and establishing a Quantum Advisory Council. It’s clear Bitcoin needs to make some fast progress here, so Coinbase is taking the role of rallying the troops and getting the right people in the room - Bitcoin core devs and the broader community - so they can start tackling this. But no one developer or company can do this alone. Real progress will require coordinated action across the ecosystem. If you’re working on post-quantum approaches for Bitcoin, we want to support you, and connect you with others that are working on it too. Please DM me directly and I’ll get you added to the working group. Bitcoin can and will upgrade, but it will take the entire community working together.