Cardano Founder: BIP-361 Is Actually a Hard Fork, May Freeze Early BTC

According to CoinDesk, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stated that Bitcoin’s quantum-resistant proposal BIP-361 has been incorrectly characterized as a soft fork—it is in fact closer to a hard fork—and fails to protect approximately 1.7 million BTC generated before 2013, including roughly 1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He explained that the zero-knowledge proof recovery mechanism outlined in the proposal relies on BIP-39 mnemonic phrases, whereas early wallets used different key-generation methods and thus cannot produce the required proofs—rendering the associated assets potentially permanently frozen under the current proposal. The report also notes that Jameson Lopp, co-author of BIP-361, described it as a rough conceptual sketch of an emergency contingency plan rather than a finalized specification.