CFO Survey Finds Crypto Control Concerns Nearly Match Volatility

A 2025 survey of large North American companies found accounting and controls complexity nearly matched price volatility as a concern for CFOs considering cryptocurrency investments.

The survey ran June 4-18, 2025, and included 200 finance chiefs at companies with annual revenue of at least $1 billion. Forty-three percent cited price volatility, compared with 42% who pointed to accounting and controls complexity. The findings concern cryptocurrency broadly, rather than Bitcoin-specific custody.

The survey also captured expectations, not completed purchases. Fifteen percent of respondents said their treasury departments were likely to buy non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies as investments within 24 months. Another 23% expected treasury use of crypto for investments or payments within two years.

Separate Bitcoin security projects have advanced through funding commitments, a transaction simulation and software planning. Strategy announced the Bitcoin Security Consortium on July 23, with nine founding companies pledging a combined $15 million over three years for Bitcoin security work, including post-quantum cryptography research. Each member directs its own funding, and the consortium does not control Bitcoin’s development. Strategy CEO Phong Le called funding the work “a natural way for us to contribute.”

Coinbase said its existing CoreKMS key management system protects about 99.9% of the assets it holds in custody and uses multi-party computation (MPC). The method distributes signing control so no single party can reconstruct a customer’s private key. Coinbase has begun building a post-quantum version called PQ-CoreKMS and set a target to deliver an automated signing pipeline within a year of its July 23 announcement. The company described research into full MPC for lattice-based and potentially other post-quantum signing schemes as a two-to-three-year effort.

BitGo and Silence Laboratories announced a post-quantum transaction simulation on May 26 using MPC-based wallet infrastructure and ML-DSA, a digital-signature algorithm standardized in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standard FIPS 204. The simulation did not demonstrate a Bitcoin transaction or a production deployment. The firms planned further development and testing with selected customers. BitGo CEO Mike Belshe said quantum computing had “moved from theoretical discussion to an infrastructure planning priority for the digital asset industry.”

The projects remain at distinct stages: a funding commitment, a simulation and software development. The survey does not show that these efforts changed companies’ crypto purchases. Coinbase’s stated near-term target is an automated signing pipeline within a year of July 23.