The Bitcoin proposal that could freeze your coins in the name of quantum defense
April 15, 2026
Weekly Issue
Crypto Tech Development
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.
Bitcoin was built on a promise that no one can touch your coins without your private key. No government, no bank, nobody. That promise is now, for the first time in Bitcoin's 16-year history, being challenged by the developer community itself — as part of measures to build defenses against future quantum computers that could compromise Bitcoin's blockchain and steal coins.
Jameson Lopp, one of the most outspoken bitcoin contributors, and other cryptographers have proposed a move that could force bitcoin holders to migrate their coins to new quantum-resistant addresses — or face having their coins frozen permanently by the network itself. In that scenario, holders would technically still "own" the coins, but lose the ability to move them. The proposal is called BIP-361, updated in Bitcoin's official repository under the title "Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset."
"Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset."
— Title of BIP-361, Bitcoin's official proposal repository
This comes as a recently released Google report warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could require significantly less firepower to compromise the Bitcoin blockchain than initially estimated — prompting some observers to cite 2029 as the quantum deadline for bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency industry is racing toward a future where AI agents handle everything from booking flights to executing trades, but new research suggests the infrastructure underpinning that shift may not be secure. McKinsey recently projected that AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. Researchers found that so-called "LLM routers" — services that sit between users and AI models — can serve as a powerful attack vector for malicious actors. These routers are designed to forward requests to models like OpenAI or Anthropic, but they also have full access to everything passing through them, including sensitive data.
Users are left extremely vulnerable as they assume they are interacting directly with a reputable AI model, when in reality many requests pass through intermediary services that can see and modify that data.
CoW Swap, a decentralized trading interface, temporarily halted its services after detecting a domain name system (DNS) hijacking incident affecting its website. The team warned users to avoid interacting with its interface until further notice. While the protocol's underlying smart contract infrastructure was not directly compromised, both backend and APIs were paused as a precaution while the team worked to resolve the issue.
DNS hijacking allows attackers to redirect users from a legitimate domain to a malicious lookalike site, often to drain crypto wallets or harvest private data. The attack vector has become a persistent weak point in decentralized finance, where users typically rely on web-based interfaces to access otherwise secure smart contracts.
The XRP Ledger added native support for zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs by integrating with Boundless, a ZK proving network — what the company claims is the first such deployment on the ledger. The move is designed to let financial institutions transact privately on the public blockchain while meeting regulatory requirements, addressing a specific barrier to institutional adoption that has persisted across every public blockchain.
Transaction flows, treasury positions, and counterparty relationships are visible by default on public ledgers — creating competitive risk for banks and funds. Zero-knowledge proofs solve this by allowing one party to prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. In practice on XRPL, a payment can be verified as valid and compliant without exposing the amount, the sender, or the receiver to the public ledger.
World Liberty Financial proposes unlocking 62.3B WLFI governance tokens
The Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial has proposed unlocking 62.3 billion WLFI governance tokens, less than a week after CoinDesk reported the venture had used 5 billion of its own tokens as collateral on lending platform Dolomite to borrow $75 million in stablecoins. WLFI's token was originally sold as a governance-only token with no transferability and indefinite locks. The proposal splits the locked supply into two groups: early supporters holding 17 billion WLFI would receive a 2-year cliff followed by a 2-year linear vest, while founders, team members, advisors, and partners holding 45.2 billion WLFI would face a 2-year cliff and 3-year vest — but with 10% of their allocation, roughly 4.5 billion tokens, burned immediately on passage.
By Shaurya Malwa
572 BTC moves from Gemini hot wallet to Winklevoss Capital addresses
Some 572 bitcoin worth $42.77 million moved from a Gemini hot wallet into wallets owned by Winklevoss Capital and custody wallets in the past 24 hours, according to Arkham Intelligence data — the first significant transfers into the fund's addresses in over a month. The transfers came in two batches of 372 BTC and 200 BTC. Winklevoss Capital now holds 9,328 BTC worth $689 million across 128 tracked addresses, and also holds 70,588 ETH worth $163.7 million, bringing its total tracked portfolio to approximately $853 million. The onchain data shows the direction of movement, not the intent — the transfers could reflect new purchases, internal rebalancing, or a partial reversal of last month's deposit.
