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Grayscale Research published a note arguing that Bitcoin’s price decline since October has been driven by a broad derisking of growth-oriented portfolios, not by fears of quantum computing.
It points to the fact that quantum computing stocks fell in lockstep with Bitcoin (BTC) over the same period as evidence against the quantum narrative.
Quantum computing isn't what's weighing on $BTC.
Quantum stocks have sold off alongside Bitcoin. If breakthroughs were the issue, we would expect the opposite.
Grayscale Research suggests the real driver = broad de-risking out of frontier tech.
Read the full article from… pic.twitter.com/hzKfFa28Wa
— Grayscale (@Grayscale) May 4, 2026
Since October 2025, Bitcoin has dropped from its all-time high above $126,000 to trade around $77,000. The decline prompted a wave of commentary attributing the sell-off partly to growing anxiety about quantum computing and its theoretical ability to break the elliptic curve cryptography that secures Bitcoin private keys.
The argument, circulating across crypto research desks and on social media, was that investors were discounting Bitcoin ahead of a potential cryptographic crisis. Grayscale’s research team is rejecting that framing directly.
The firm’s note, published on April 6, 2026 under the title ‘It’s Time to Get Ready for a Post-Quantum Future,’ presents a single piece of evidence that it says should settle the question: the share prices of public companies focused on quantum computing, including IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum, which trade on US exchanges, fell sharply over the same October-to-present period that Bitcoin declined.
If new quantum computing breakthroughs were genuinely threatening Bitcoin’s security and depressing its price, rational markets would have sent quantum computing stocks higher as investors priced in a competitive advantage for firms advancing the technology. Instead, both went down together, and by similar magnitudes.
Grayscale’s explanation for the pullback is that both Bitcoin and quantum computing stocks are classified by institutional portfolio managers as high-beta, frontier technology assets. When concern over AI disruption accelerated across institutional portfolios in late 2025 and into 2026, risk managers reduced gross exposure to the entire growth-oriented bucket simultaneously.
Bitcoin was sold not because its cryptography was under threat but because it sits in the same portfolio sleeve as Nvidia, software stocks, and speculative tech positions, and those sleeves were being reduced across the board.
Grayscale published a separate research note earlier in 2026 documenting Bitcoin’s increasing correlation with the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, known as IGV. That note described Bitcoin as trading more like a growth asset than like gold in the current environment, and Grayscale’s latest publication acknowledges the same dynamic while arguing it does not represent a permanent change in Bitcoin’s fundamental role as a store of value.
The firm said it expects the growth-asset correlation to persist when prices rebound but does not view it as evidence that Bitcoin’s monetary properties have changed.
Grayscale does not dismiss quantum risk but views it as a long term engineering challenge rather than an immediate driver of Bitcoin’s price.
Breaking Bitcoin’s ECDSA secp256k1 would require millions of stable, error corrected qubits, far beyond current systems like Google’s 105 qubit Willow chip, with most estimates placing real risk well beyond 2030.
Meanwhile, post quantum standards such as ML-KEM and ML-DSA are now defined, and networks like Solana have already selected Falcon-512 and begun implementation, while Ethereum explores quantum resistant wallets, reinforcing the view that the industry has time to adapt without immediate valuation impact.
The firm closes its note with a direct statement for investors who have been using quantum uncertainty as a reason to delay allocation: waiting for a full post-quantum blockchain upgrade before taking exposure is not necessary.
Grayscale’s position is that valuations can recover well before any complete protocol migration is completed, and that the post-quantum transition is, in its words, ‘conceptually straightforward’ given that quantum-secure methods already exist and are being actively implemented.
The note does not give a price target or a recovery timeline, but its structure is clearly designed to remove one specific objection from the list of reasons a cautious institutional allocator might cite for staying on the sidelines.
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