The cryptocurrency market once again felt the chill of the macroeconomic climate in early September. As of the evening of September 8, Bitcoin (BTC) was trading at $78,475.12, down 0.9% on the day; Ethereum (ETH) edged down 0.1% to $2,484.36; and Solana (SOL) slipped 0.6% to close at $103.37. The overall market pressure stemmed primarily from investor concerns that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates again, as well as from the recent surge in crude oil prices, which broadly suppressed risk assets. At the same time, the Liquid Network, a Layer-2 blockchain network designed to enhance transaction speed, suffered a hacker attack, adding additional short-term selling pressure on Bitcoin.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded positive inflows at the end of last week, with the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) seeing net inflows exceeding $117 million on Friday. However, as U.S. stock markets were closed on Monday, the specific movements of ETFs will not become clear until subsequent trading days. For now, market attention is firmly fixed on the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting later this month. Data from the CME FedWatch Tool shows that traders are pricing in more than a 60% probability of a rate hike at this meeting, an expectation that has made investors more cautious.
Among the major cryptocurrencies, which mostly weakened, Ethereum posted the smallest decline and performed relatively firmly. This may be related to the Ethereum Foundation’s announcement yesterday that it would prioritize advancing quantum-resistant preparedness, while continued buying by institutional player Bitmine Immersion Technologies also provided support for the coin’s price.
Concerns that quantum computers might crack Bitcoin’s encryption keys have surfaced from time to time in analytical circles in recent years. Bitcoin’s security is built on a public-key and private-key system, where conventional computers cannot reverse-engineer the private key from the public key. However, with Shor’s algorithm, quantum computers could theoretically identify mathematical patterns in elliptic curve cryptography and drastically shorten the time required to break it, thus posing a potential risk to existing Bitcoin addresses.
Nevertheless, multiple recent technological advances suggest that such fears are premature. Developers have designed stronger mathematical locks through Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), with the core idea of BIP-360 being to hide the public key so that it cannot be reverse-tracked by quantum computers. While these quantum-resistant locks require higher computational demands, developers plan to use tools such as zero-knowledge proofs to compress and bundle large numbers of quantum signatures, thereby maintaining the blockchain’s processing speed. In addition, the Bitcoin network will set a grace period of up to five years for users to migrate their assets to new quantum-resistant addresses, after which old addresses will be frozen, effectively preventing dormant assets from being compromised by future quantum computers.
In the short term, macro policy directions remain the core variable driving crypto asset prices, while hacking incidents and quantum computing concerns have exacerbated market volatility. At a fundamental level, however, the Bitcoin community has already prepared for the future, building a defensive system through both technological iteration and migration mechanisms. The most advanced quantum systems currently in existence are far from reaching the scale and stability required to break Bitcoin’s encryption. By the time that technology matures, Bitcoin’s public keys will have long since been upgraded or frozen. Therefore, investors should not discount Bitcoin’s long-term value foundation based on the distant risk of quantum computing.
