A full history examination of the XRP Ledger has put new numbers on one of cryptocurrencies’ most vexing long-term security questions: how vulnerable current accounts will be to the threat of quantum computing in the future. The analysis, shared by the dUNL Vet on Checked it All 7,810,364 XRP Ledger accounts, and found that 76.82 billion tokens currently reside in accounts whose public keys have already been exposed through signed transactions.
The issue does not argue that attackers with quantum capabilities pose a direct operational risk. Instead, he frames the issue as a future immigration and governance problem. Once Quantum-resistant encryption is implementedActive users can transfer funds to new quantum secure accounts. The more difficult question is what happens to accounts that cannot move.
“What quantum threat problem is so difficult to agree on how to solve?” The vet wrote. “We will need quantum proof encryption eventually. This is the most likely outcome. This means that once this encryption is implemented, everyone can transfer their funds to an XRP account that is resistant to quantum threats.”
He said the difficulty begins where user agency ends. Dormant accounts may belong to people who have lost their keys, forgotten their belongings, died, or are temporarily unable to act. In a future where quantum computers can exploit exposed public keys, these funds could become vulnerable while the owner remains silent.
“This is actually the problem,” the vet wrote. “People who cannot transfer their funds to a quantum threat-resistant XRP account are at risk of having their funds stolen in the future with sufficiently capable quantum computers.”
Why are exposed XRP public keys important?
Vet’s analysis relies on a key distinction: an account is considered “quantum exposed” only if it submits a signed transaction that exposes its public key on the ledger. Accounts that never signed a transaction did not reveal this public key and are therefore treated as quantum safe under the framework used in the examination.
This distinction creates a divide across the ledger. According to Vet, 5.6 million accounts containing 76.82 billion tokens are quantitatively exposed when dormancy is not taken into account. However, he said that 96% of exposed XRP is held by active accounts, meaning those users are expected to migrate once a quantum-resistant account model becomes available.
The most controversial segment is the passive display. Accounts with quantum exposure that have been dormant for at least five years contain 3.83% of the total quantum-exposed XRP supply. Against the total supply of XRP, this represents 2.94%. The oldest dormant category, accounts dating back to the ledger inception year of 2013, represents 0.03% of the exposed XRP supply and 0.024% of the total supply.
The number of accounts follows the same pattern. The vet identified 1.33 million accounts in the five-year inactive and exposed group, while the 2013 inactive group contains approximately 15,000 accounts.
Is it a smaller passive risk than Bitcoin?
Vet placed the XRP Ledger’s dormant exposure as materially smaller than Bitcoin’s most discussed quantum risk edge case: early unaffected BTC, including coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.
“Much less than Bitcoin, which is the genesis alone It is also known as Satoshi BTC “About 5% of the supply,” he wrote. “This is a supply that is expected not to move to quantum secure addresses. This does not even include Bitcoin Sitting in P2PK accounts Outside of Satoshi’s holdings.
The comparison is important because the quantitative debate in the cryptocurrency space is not just technical. It’s social. If the network introduces quantum-resistant account types, active users can rotate. Inactive users cannot. This raises a difficult governance question: Should untouched funds remain exposed, should the rules of the protocol somehow protect them, or should the network accept the risk that future attackers could drain accounts whose owners never migrated?
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Vet described the dormant account issue as “a true test of the social class of blockchain,” noting that the XRP Ledger community faces the same type of questions that Bitcoin users discussed about early wallets.
Multi-Sig is not automatically safe
The examination also found that about 27% of XRPL accounts are already secure, collectively holding approximately 23.16 billion XRP. These accounts either never signed a transaction, meaning their public key never appeared in the ledger, or they disabled their master key and are now signing through a new, undisclosed RegularKey or SignerList, Vet said.
But the analysis also cautions against assuming that more sophisticated wallet settings are protected by default. Vet said 242 multi-signature wallets hold 36.60 billion XRP, equivalent to 36.6% of the total supply, in a state where a quorum of the signers’ public keys is already visible in the ledger. The biggest examples include Ripple’s escrow distribution wallets, he said.
“So even complex multi-signature setups are not automatically secure — they require controlled rotation of the signing key,” Viet wrote.
The nuance is operational. A single-key account can remain secure until it needs to spend, but the spending exposes the relevant public key. Multi-signature settings can maintain security if the quorum threshold has not yet been detected. Vet gave an example of a 4 of 8 SignerList with the master key disabled and showing only three signer keys in the ledger: The account can remain secure because the exposed keys are still below the signing threshold.
At press time, XRP was trading at $1.3758.
Featured image created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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