ARK’s Research Director Says Most Adviser Questions Are About Quantum, Not Token Revenue

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Key takeaways

About 70% of questions from registered investment advisers to ARK concern quantum risk.
ARK internally estimates the quantum threat is 10 to 20 years away.
ARK participates in the Bitcoin Security Consortium to help address future quantum risks.

Professional money managers who ask ARK Invest about crypto mostly want to know about quantum computing, not token economics, according to Lorenzo Valente, ARK’s director of research for digital assets.

Valente estimated on Unchained, in a livestream recorded Oct. 12, that “probably 70%” of the questions ARK fields from registered investment advisers and wealth-management platforms concern quantum risk. They ask whether the signatures securing blockchains will have to be replaced and which networks have the better plan, he said. Metrics insiders assume such clients track, like token inflation or protocol revenue, are largely unknown to them, he added.

Host Laura Shin said on the show that she found it “impressive that they’re that sophisticated.” Valente suggested a reason: quantum “is more of a general technology that they’ve heard also like in other fields.”

Evaluating the timeline and AI impact

Valente was clear that quantum is not his own research area. “I’m not the one specifically that, that has done the work on that,” he said on the show, adding that ARK’s internal view places the threat roughly 10 to 20 years out. He also noted, “I’m not a cryptographer.”

The discussion came days after researcher Justin Drake wrote on Oct. 7 that ECDSA, the elliptic-curve signature scheme behind Bitcoin and Ethereum keys, could break “in the worst case in months not years,” citing AI’s rapid progress in math. Unchained covered the debate that followed. The speed of AI advances has made it much harder to set timelines for investment theses, Valente said, calling the situation “definitely scary.”

Collaboration on post-quantum solutions

Asked how Bitcoin can handle the threat, Valente said ARK has been in talks with large industry players and with core developers, and that it is in a “consortium with MicroStrategy and some of the other companies that are thinking about this.”

That group is the Bitcoin Security Consortium, which Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, announced in July with ARK, BlackRock, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets and others among its founding members.

Valente said he now expects Bitcoin to find a solution before Q-Day, the point at which a quantum computer could break today’s cryptography, and make the transition. “I was much more worried a year ago,” he said. “I think people are aware of this, and they’re working on it.”

Valente said ETF issuers, exchanges, developers and miners all now have a stake, and that “there are just more companies that are depending on Bitcoin right now than, like, two or three years ago.”

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