Venture capitalist Nic Carter warned that institutions holding large amounts of Bitcoin (BTC) will eventually lose patience with developers over quantum computing inaction - and attempt what he called a "corporate takeover" of protocol governance.
BlackRock, which holds roughly 761,801 BTC worth about $50 billion, was his primary example.
Carter made the comments on the Bits and Bips podcast, published Thursday.
What He Said
"I think the big institutions that now exist in Bitcoin, they will get fed up, and they will fire the devs and put in new devs," Carter said. He added that the takeover would be "a successful one."
He pointed to BlackRock's fiduciary obligations as the driving force. "If you're BlackRock and you have billions of dollars of client assets in this thing and its problems aren't being addressed, what choice do you have?" he said.
Austin Campbell, founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting, echoed a similar concern on the same episode, saying large holders will eventually "be required to speak up" if they perceive a structural problem.
What Carter Is Not Disclosing on the Podcast
Carter's firm, Castle Island Ventures, led the $20 million Series A in Project Eleven - a quantum-defense startup valued at $120 million - in January.
Carter sits on the company's board.
He disclosed the investment in a Substack post from October 2025.
But anyone hearing his institutional-takeover argument without that context is missing a material financial incentive for quantum risk to be treated as urgent.
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What the Data Shows
A CoinShares report published Feb. 9 estimated that just 10,230 BTC - out of 1.63 million in legacy addresses with exposed public keys - sit in wallets large enough to cause market disruption if compromised.
The rest would take centuries to crack even under optimistic quantum projections.
Breaking Bitcoin's elliptic-curve cryptography would require millions of fault-tolerant qubits. Google's most advanced quantum computer, Willow, has 105.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back - who has contributed directly to Bitcoin's codebase - accused Carter in December of making "uninformed noise." Back said developers are working on quantum readiness quietly and that practical threats remain decades away.
A technical proposal, BIP-360, already exists for opt-in quantum-resistant address formats. But Bitcoin's consensus-driven governance makes rapid adoption of any upgrade difficult by design - the same property that makes the network resistant to the kind of corporate takeover Carter describes.
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