Crypto industry races to prepare for quantum computing threat
Google’s new estimate put Bitcoin’s core cryptography within reach of fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, jolting crypto firms toward migration plans. U.S. agencies now face 2030 and 2031 deadlines.
The crypto industry is starting to draw up defenses against a threat that once sounded remote: quantum computers that could someday break the cryptography protecting wallets and transactions. Google Quantum AI’s March 30-31 whitepaper estimates that the secp256k1 elliptic-curve system used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies might take fewer than 500,000 physical qubits to crack, a far lower estimate than older projections.
The paper was co-authored by Google researchers, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh. The expected arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers would mark a sharp break in digital security.
Bitcoin-style networks expose different levels of information at different moments. Bitcoin addresses are hashes of public keys until coins are spent, but the full public key is revealed on-chain in the spending transaction. Address reuse is discouraged: once a public key is visible, it can become a target if quantum-capable attacks ever become practical.
Drake publicly put a 10% chance on the possibility that a quantum computer could recover a private key from an exposed public key by 2032. Citi and other researchers argue that advances in both quantum computing and artificial intelligence are tightening the timeline for risk, adding pressure on exchanges, custodians and blockchain developers to move before the hardware catches up.
On June 22, President Donald Trump signed one executive order to accelerate U.S. quantum innovation and another to speed the migration to post-quantum cryptography. Federal guidance tied to that effort sets deadlines for agencies to move high-value and high-impact systems to post-quantum cryptographic keys by December 31, 2030, and to post-quantum digital signatures by the end of 2031.
NIST approved the first three federal post-quantum cryptography standards, FIPS 203, FIPS 204 and FIPS 205, in August 2024, and plans to deprecate quantum-vulnerable algorithms and remove them from its standards by 2035. The Ethereum Foundation has also formed a dedicated post-quantum security team.
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