Bitcoin’s developer community should stop waiting for certainty about quantum-computing timelines and focus on getting a post-quantum signature scheme into production, Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.

Pruden said the asymmetry between acting now and waiting favors action.

“We added some new cryptography, we kind of built in this optionality, it turns out we didn’t need quite yet, but at least we have it,” he said, describing the worst case of moving early.

The worst case of moving late is far worse: a sufficiently capable quantum computer could derive private keys from any exposed public key using Shor’s algorithm, the 1994 algorithm that remains the canonical example of what a quantum machine can do that a classical one cannot.

Pruden valued the asset at stake at roughly $2.3 trillion.

“In a very real sense, someone with a sufficiently large and capable quantum computer kind of owns everyone’s digital assets or bitcoin for the public key that they can see,” Pruden said.

The path forward, Pruden said, is to introduce a new signature scheme into Bitcoin that does not rely on the classical math underlying the elliptic-curve digital signature algorithm, or ECDSA, it uses today.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has standardized post-quantum schemes based on hash functions and lattices, he said, and Bitcoin community discussion has trended toward the hash-based option. BIP-360, proposed last year, laid groundwork for adding a quantum-resistant Taproot output type, and Blockstream has deployed a hash-based signature scheme on its Liquid Network.

“Moving stuff out of just research into production is, I think, actually what we need to focus on,” Pruden said. “Let’s focus on the D of R&D.”

The migration will be substantially harder than the Taproot upgrade, Pruden warned.

“Taproot took five years, but that’s not even really the entire challenge that this will take.” Where Taproot was opt-in and most users never bothered migrating, every bitcoin holder and every wallet, exchange and institution that touches the asset will need to participate in a post-quantum migration.

Pruden said the timing risk is severe: if a quantum computer arrives before users have migrated, an attacker could front-run pending transactions within a single block time, paying a higher fee to capture funds whose private keys it has just derived.

Pressed on the unresolved debate over what to do with bitcoin sitting in dormant, quantum-vulnerable addresses, Pruden urged the community to defer that fight and focus on the migration itself. Harper framed that debate as involving upward of 5 million dormant coins, including coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto via the so-called “Patoshi” pattern of early miner blocks.

“The question of the Satoshi coins in particular is a hard one,” Pruden said, because it puts two philosophical commitments in tension: Bitcoin’s fixed-supply ethos and its commitment to digital property rights. Asked for his personal lean, Pruden said the dormant coins could potentially be “recycle[d] back into the end of the supply curve” to extend Bitcoin’s mining-incentive runway after the block subsidy runs out.

“If you put me on the hot seat, that’s probably what I would say,” Pruden said. “So I guess overall would be the confiscation side. But again, I think ultimately, the community is going to decide. The institutions and the market are going to decide.”

On whether Bitcoin Core developers are taking the threat seriously, Pruden said the answer is mixed. “Core is not a monolithic entity. So I think there are definitely [some] in Core that are taking it seriously. I think there are some people that have the opinion” that quantum computers will never arrive. He pointed to the broader scientific community as a counterweight: “The majority of physicists out there, if you ask them this, they’ll say, yes, it will be a thing. And by the way, many of them believe that the timelines are accelerating.”

The same physics that makes quantum computers a threat to existing cryptography may also seed the next generation of cryptographic primitives, he said, citing key-exchange protocols based on quantum entanglement and certified-randomness work that won the Turing Award last year.

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said lawmakers working towards passage of a digital asset market structure bill likely need to meet three conditions before the chamber could vote on the legislation.

Speaking at the Consensus conference in Miami on Wednesday, Gillibrand said she considered addressing consumer protection, illicit finance, and ethics provisions essential before any potential vote on the CLARITY Act. She said that if Congress were to consider those issues, as well as combine the draft of the market structure bill with the version already passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee and ensure ethics language, lawmakers could have a vote “before the August recess,” which begins Aug. 10.

“There will be no one voting for this bill if we don’t have an ethics provision,” said Gillibrand. “Because the truth is, is that we cannot allow members of Congress, senior administration officials, presidents or vice presidents, to get rich off of these industries because of their insider status. It is the worst form of pay for play.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand speaking on Wednesday. Source: Cointelegraph

Although Gillibrand did not explicitly mention US President Donald Trump by name, his ties to the crypto industry, through the launch of his memecoin, his family’s crypto business World Liberty Financial, and other dealings with the industry have come under scrutiny as lawmakers consider the CLARITY Act.

Last week, senators on the banking committee announced a deal on stablecoin yield which could allow the market structure bill to advance, but did not address language on public officials’ potential conflicts of interest.

Related: Americans distrust crypto, AI as industry super PACs flood midterms, poll finds

Crypto industry leaders and advocates have been weighing in on the market structure bill since the stablecoin yield compromise was announced. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said on Tuesday that lawmakers likely needed to address the bill in the next two weeks before it became muddied by issues amid the US midterm elections.

“There’s a window of opportunity, and that’s always important that you act when you find that window of opportunity,” said Summer Mersinger, a former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and CEO of the Blockchain Association, in a separate panel on the market structure bill at Consensus on Wednesday.

“That doesn’t mean the window’s not going to open again. You just never know what’s going to happen in the intervening events that maybe will bring people back to this issue after August recess,” she said.

Bill awaits markup in Senate Banking Committee

As of Wednesday, the Senate Banking Committee had not rescheduled a markup on the market structure bill after postponing the event in January. At the time, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the exchange could not support the legislation as written, leading to other crypto companies and advocates speaking out against certain provisions in the bill on decentralized finance, stablecoins and tokenized equities.

Traders on prediction markets platform Polymarket see a 65% chance of the CLARITY Act being signed into law by the end of 2026. On Kalshi, traders currently put the probabilty that the bill will become law before August at 49%.

Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs: Mid-2026

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Wall Street’s clearinghouse is working with blockchain developers to bring one of capital market’s least glamorous but most operationally complex functions onchain: corporate actions.

Frank La Salla, CEO of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), said Wednesday at Consensus 2026 in Miami that the market infrastructure giant is collaborating with several layer-1 (L1) blockchain networks to improve how dividend payments, tender offers and other post-trade events could be processed in tokenized markets.

“We are working with some very good L1s right now, who are focused on the ability to process at faster rates, have higher resiliency,” he said.

Currently, the bottleneck is that on most blockchain networks could take a few days to process corporate actions, he pointed out.

“We process millions of dividend payments a day to feed to the industry,” Le Salla said. “We need high-performance L1s to do that.”

DTCC sits at the center of U.S. capital markets infrastructure, processing roughly $20 trillion in Treasury and corporate securities trades each day. The clearinghouse has spent nearly a decade exploring blockchain applications, but La Salla said the technology only became commercially meaningful once real-world use cases began to emerge in the pst few years.

Recently, the firm accelerated its push to modernize market infrastructure with tokenization and blockchain tech. This week, DTCC announced to begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July ahead of a broader rollout in October.

La Salla said collateral movement may become blockchain’s first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized collateral could allow firms outside U.S. market hours to access liquidity in real time without relying on legacy settlement windows. He described a scenario where firms in Asia could access U.S. dollar on a Sunday in New York by posting tokenized collateral onchain in real-time.

“That is incredibly powerful,” La Salla said.

But he cautioned that blockchain systems still face major hurdles around scalability, liquidity fragmentation and risk management.

One challenge, for example, is netting transactions. Traditional market infrastructure compresses massive trading activity into smaller settlement obligations, reducing capital requirements across the system.

“Blockchain is decentralized,” La Salla said. “Many of the efficiencies that we get in our industry are through concentration of liquidity.”

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) changing approach to crypto regulation is giving market operators more room to experiment with blockchain-based infrastructure and tokenized assets.

Speaking at Consensus in Miami on Wednesday, Cohen said the industry now feels it can “build” again after years of regulatory uncertainty.

“The gray zone four years ago was a no-fly zone,” Cohen said. “The gray zone now is we can build. We can gain some scale. We can experiment without maybe any brush back.”

Cohen described a broader shift inside financial markets toward “always on” trading systems that operate nearly around the clock and move money, securities and collateral faster than traditional infrastructure.

Nasdaq, which provides trading technology to more than 130 markets globally, is investing in blockchain infrastructure, tokenization and artificial intelligence as part of that transition, Cohen said.

“We’re embracing two trends,” he said. “Always on market infrastructure” and “convergence” between traditional financial rails and digital asset systems.

Cohen said interoperability between those systems remains one of the largest hurdles for the industry. Firms do not want to operate separate infrastructures for traditional securities and tokenized assets, he said.

“Whether you’re in the existing world or you’re in the digital world, let me tell you, I’m bringing it all together for you so you get the benefits of both,” Cohen said.

He also pointed to a more collaborative stance from regulators.

“The SEC is much more constructive,” Cohen said. “It’s not even open mindedness. It’s a proactivity.”

Cohen said tokenization could eventually make assets easier to move, finance and trade while giving issuers better insight into shareholders.

“What it really does is take an asset and put it in motion,” he said.

Nasdaq is also testing AI systems designed to simulate trading activity in a digital replica of its matching engine. Cohen said the technology could help the exchange test market stress scenarios and improve software reliability as markets move toward extended trading hours.

Grant Cardone, a multibillionaire real estate investor, said Wednesday he added another $100 million in bitcoin as part of a strategy combining the asset with income-producing real estate, during a Fireside chat at Consensus Miami 2026.

“We just simply added another $100 million of bitcoin,” Cardone said, describing a recent property deal where BTC was paired with a $235 million asset, a hybrid strategy he believes will outperform real estate investment trusts (REITs).

Cardone said traditional real estate investment trusts are structurally limited. “These companies can never, ever hold bitcoin on their balance sheet,” he said. “We believe by combining real estate and bitcoin […] I’ll end up with somewhere between a 22 and a 32% return.”

The property investor said the latest allocation builds on an earlier bitcoin purchase made in 2025, when Cardone Capital added 1,000 BTC to its balance sheet, a position valued at just over $100 million at the time, bringing the firm’s total bitcoin exposure to roughly $200 million.

The real estate mogul said the structure combines two asset types within a single investment vehicle. “I have two assets that we just fused together in an LLC,” Cardone said.

He explained the approach also consists of introducing new investors to bitcoin. “Eighty percent of the people that invested in that fund own zero bitcoin,” he said, adding that the strategy does not involve putting real estate directly on blockchain rails.

“I’m not putting real estate on the blockchain,” Cardone said. “All I’m doing is buying a bunch of bitcoin and stuffing it into the discount gap.”

However, in February, In an X post, the investor said that Cardone Capital had plans to tokenize its holdings to give investors “collateral and liquidity in the secondary markets.” At the time, he also said the firm aimed to become a market leader in tokenizing assets at scale.

At Consensus, Cardone explained his hybrid strategy combines stable cash flow with bitcoin exposure. “If bitcoin goes to zero, I’m not getting rid of the real estate.” He said the combined model is intended to compete with existing real estate structures. “I’m going to rip [their] face off,” referring to competing investments without bitcoin exposure.

Fairshake has spent $28 million in 2026 primaries as a new poll shows most Americans distrust crypto and AI, raising questions about the political value of industry-backed super PAC money.

Fairshake, the pro-crypto super PAC backed by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and Ripple, has spent $28 million across competitive 2026 primaries. Combined with pro-AI group Leading the Future, which launched in August 2025 and has raised more than $75 million, the two industry-aligned groups have together deployed over $100 million in the current midterm cycle.

The spending arrives against a difficult backdrop. A Public First poll conducted for Politico in April, surveying 2,035 US adults, found 45% of Americans say investing in cryptocurrency is not worth the risk, 44% say AI is developing too fast, and nearly two-thirds want Congress to impose strict regulations or broad AI oversight.

“I do think if they see somebody is backed by crypto, that’s always going to be a problem,” former Ohio Representative Jim Renacci was quoted as saying.

Despite those distrust numbers, public awareness of both groups remains remarkably low. Only 3% of respondents recognised Fairshake, and just 9% had heard of Leading the Future.

Political observers told Politico that backlash could be swift once voters make the connection between the spending and the industries behind it.

The stakes for crypto legislation are direct. As crypto.news reported, if Democrats take either chamber in November, the CLARITY Act’s passage odds are described as close to zero, with Senator Elizabeth Warren likely to take over the Senate Banking Committee chair.

Fairshake’s current $193 million war chest is explicitly aimed at preventing that scenario. In 2024, a Fairshake-affiliated PAC spent over $40 million helping unseat Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a longtime crypto critic who is now running again.

TLDR:

• Colombia generates 75% of its electricity from renewables, giving it a strong edge in clean Bitcoin mining.
• President Petro proposed Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and Riohacha as prime Caribbean Bitcoin mining locations.
• The Wayúu community, Colombia’s largest Indigenous group, could become co-owners of the mining project.
• Petro’s term ends in August, leaving the next administration to decide the future of the mining proposal.

---

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro eyes Bitcoin mining as a transformative opportunity for the country’s Caribbean coast.

He has identified cities like Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and Riohacha as prime locations for large-scale mining operations. The plan centers on converting the country’s surplus renewable energy into a steady revenue stream.

Petro has also proposed that the Wayúu community, Colombia’s largest Indigenous group, become co-owners of the project. With his term ending in August, time remains short to move the plan forward.

Petro Sees Renewable Energy as the Backbone of His Mining Vision

Colombia generates around 75% of its electricity from renewable sources, according to a World Bank report from April 2024.

That output is more than twice the global average, putting the country in a strong position. Petro wants to use that surplus power to draw foreign investment into the Caribbean region. Bitcoin mining, in his view, offers a practical way to turn unused electricity into consistent income.

La Guajira, a wind-rich province on the Caribbean coast, sits at the center of this proposal. State-owned energy company Ecopetrol is currently building the Windpeshi wind project there.

The facility is expected to begin operations by 2028, adding significant clean energy capacity to the grid. That additional supply could make the region more competitive for large mining investors.

Petro shared his vision on X after Luxor Technology’s Alessandro Cecere posted about Paraguay’s mining growth. Cecere noted that Paraguay now holds 4.3% of the global Bitcoin hashrate.

The country reached that position by tapping hydroelectric power from the Itaipu Dam. Responding to that data, Petro said the Caribbean coast holds similar potential, calling it “an immense boost to the development of the Caribbean.”

Petro also addressed environmental concerns directly in his X post. He warned that “if virtual currencies are based on fossil energy, global warming explodes and climate collapse ensues.”

His Caribbean coast proposal deliberately relies on clean energy to avoid those outcomes. The approach ties economic growth to environmental responsibility in a single strategy.

Political Clock and Global Competition Shape the Road Ahead

Petro’s presidential term ends in August, leaving him a narrow window to advance the initiative. Constitutional limits bar him from seeking re-election in the May 31 vote.

The next president will decide whether the Bitcoin mining proposal continues or stalls. So far, no leading candidate has offered a clear stance on the matter.

Prediction market Kalshi places Senator Iván Cepeda Castro and conservative lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella as the frontrunners in the upcoming election.

Neither has made notable public statements on Bitcoin or digital assets. Without clear support from the incoming administration, the plan faces an uncertain future. Investors and industry observers are monitoring the political landscape closely.

Meanwhile, global competition for Bitcoin mining activity continues to grow. The United States has put forward the “Mined in America Act” to expand domestic operations.

Russia now counts mining among its export revenue sources. Ethiopia is actively pursuing foreign capital to build out its own mining infrastructure.

Hashlabs managing partner Jaran Mellerud has noted that the industry “can have a sizable economic impact on emerging countries looking to convert otherwise unused electricity into cash flow.”

As American miners pivot toward AI and high-performance computing, opportunities are opening up for other nations.

Countries with lower electricity costs are also better placed to capture a larger share of global hashrate. Colombia’s renewable energy advantage could position it well in that expanding global race.

AI agents will become more relevant than humans on the internet within the next decade, a shift already already forcing Google, Facebook and Amazon to react, said Charles Hoskinson.

In his keynote at Consensus Miami 2026 on Wednesday, Hoskinson also said that “by 2035, the majority of searches, commerce and activity on the internet will be AI agents instead of people.”

He said the change threatens existing business models. “Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re terrified of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that companies are investing heavily because “all of their business models are going to be disrupted.”

AI Agents do not click ads or have brand preferences, Hoskinson explained, saying this “threatens the advertising-driven models of platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook.”

“Why do you think Google is interested in x402?” he asked his audience of the Coinbase-backed protocol that enables AI agents and applications to make direct, programmatic payments over the internet using stablecoins and crypto rails.

Hoskinson noted this shift will change how crypto is used, adding that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly handle tasks such as due diligence, transaction execution and interaction with decentralized finance.

Hoskinson AI agent forecast echoes that of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said “very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao, who predicted they “will make one million times more payments than humans.”

On the flipside, Hoskinson said AI agents are the “single best thing to ever happen to cryptocurrencies” because it simplifies user experience.

The Cardano founder warned crypto users against relying on intermediaries rather than maintaining direct control of their assets, which is the principle, he said, crypto was built on.

“You have to own your data. You have to own your identity. You have to own your money,” he said, adding that users are “outsourcing that to custodial wallets,” “permissioned networks,” and “third parties that they come to regret trusting when they get their account shut down.”

He also pointed to fragmentation across blockchain ecosystems as a barrier to progress, saying it has slowed down development. “There’s been 11 million tokens issued over the years. We have enough of them,” Hoskinson said. “What I want is cooperation. What I want is the mission to be achieved.”

User experience remains a key issue limiting user adoption, said Hoskinson, who described the current crypto onboarding processes as complex and prone to error. “That is the user experience in 2026,” he said. “Is this like a product you want to use?”

He said technologies such as account abstraction and chain abstraction could simplify how users interact with crypto systems, while maintaining control over assets and identity.

Hoskinson highlighted changing attitudes among financial institutions, noting that JPMorgan has moved from restricting crypto-related activity to developing blockchain-based products. “Back when we started JPMorgan was turning people’s bank accounts off and now they have a blockchain product,” he said.

Bitcoin dominance climbed to 61% on Wednesday, its highest level since November 2025. The metric has risen from 58.44% at the start of April, proving that the bullish trend continues to favor BTC over the wider crypto market.

In the last two months, altcoin volumes on Binance also increased by 49%, while 12.6% of altcoins on Binance reclaimed their 200-day simple moving average (SMA). 

Bitcoin dominance, one-week chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Altcoins show early signs of recovery

Crypto analyst Darkfost said Bitcoin has gained 36% since its Feb. 6 lows at $60,000, helping push its dominance to 61.3%. 

While altcoins spent much of that period under pressure, TOTAL3, which tracks the crypto market cap excluding Bitcoin and Ether, rose by 17% to a two-month high of $765 billion. The recovery pace of altcoins lagged behind BTC, but several indicators have started to improve.

TOTAL3, one-week chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Data from CryptoQuant showed that trading activity in the altcoin market was slowly increasing. Their volume share on Binance climbed to 49% on Wednesday, up from 31% in March, when measured against the combined BTC and ETH futures trading volumes. The rise points to growing participation outside of Bitcoin and Ether after several months of capital concentration in the two largest crypto assets.

Darkfost added that the shift still looks moderate and sits far from the aggressive rotation phases seen during the previous altcoin rally in 2024. 

Altcoin dominance by volume. Source: CryptoQuant

Related: Zcash price may hit $800 as $2.7B hedge fund reveals ‘significant position’ in ZEC

Exchange volume trends point to a rotation

Market analyst CW8900 pointed to the rising activity on centralized exchanges (CEX) as another sign of improving participation beyond Bitcoin. According to the analyst, altcoin trading volume, excluding the five largest cryptocurrencies, has increased steadily over the past few weeks.

CEX volume ratio vs Top 5 crypto. Source: CryptoQuant

The 90-day AltSeason Index also climbed to 28.6, its fastest recovery in months. The index tracks whether a majority of altcoins outperform Bitcoin over a set period. Readings above 75 are associated with stronger altcoin cycles. However, CW8900 added, 

“The indicator also shows that there was no real AltSeason in this cycle. The period when the AltSeason Index reached its highest point was early 2024, and even that value was relatively low compared to previous AltSeasons.”

CryptoQuant data also showed improvements across the altcoin market after months of heavy underperformance against Bitcoin. The average altcoin now trades 23.47% below its 200-day simple moving average, rising from 44.4% earlier in the cycle. Similar readings previously appeared near the end of late-stage bear markets in 2022.

Altcoin performance, on average, relative to the 200-day SMA. Source: CryptoQuant

Related: Crypto Fear and Greed Index turns neutral for first time since January: Is $100K BTC next?

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.