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

Unchained Edited by Jeff Albus Posted October 12, 2026 at 10:57 pm ET. Quick Take ARK’s Lorenzo Valente said about 70% of questions from registered investment advisers concern quantum risk, not token metrics. ARK’s internal view puts the quantum threat 10 to 20 years out, though AI progress has made timelines harder to set. Valente said he is more confident than a year ago that Bitcoin will switch signatures before quantum computers can break them. 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.”

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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.”

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.”

Related Listen: One Type of Post-Quantum Cryptography Is Most Popular. Why Is Crypto Trying Out Three? AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.

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