Quantum Computers Can Now Break Crypto With Just 10,000 Qubits and How This Impacts the Entire Market

The time for breaking the code behind a cryptocurrency (Crypto) has been drastically shortened.

Until now, you may have believed that Quantum Computers were many years away from being able to pose a threat to Bitcoin, Ethereum or some other form of digital asset. A recent paper has proved this theory to be inaccurate altogether. The author of the paper is someone we have followed attentively.

The Breakthrough You Can't Afford to Ignore

The most exciting news from Oratomic, Caltech, and UC Berkeley comes from researchers who made a huge discovery about how quantum computers can hack cryptocurrencies. They demonstrated that a quantum computer could breach elliptic curve cryptography, using only 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits. This is suspected to be a potential attack vector for cryptocurrencies to be hacked.

Let that sink in.

Until now, we believed that millions of qubits would be needed to crack the encryption used to secure wallets. This new piece of research really reduces that number by a lot. What was once just an idea is becoming a real possibility.

Dolev Bluvstein, the lead author on the paper and a co-founder at Oratomic, is a Project Eleven advisor. We have been following his research closely since the 2024 Nature paper about his logical processors with arrays of atoms, which was the first experimental demonstration of the architecture that underpins this latest result. That original work established the architecture, and this new work shows that we are very close to being able to build such an architecture.

And here is where it gets interesting — and here's where you really need to pay attention.

Why This Changes Everything in Three Steps

Let's break down what's actually happening, because understanding this is the difference between protecting your assets and watching them evaporate.

In the past, cryptographers believed that breaking RSA-2048, or elliptic curve cryptography, would require approximately twenty million noisy qubits. This approximation gave the impression that there was a fair amount of time before a sufficiently advanced quantum computer would become a reality and allow crypto users to continue using these encryption algorithms.

Using reconfigurable atom arrays (a very different type of qubit architecture), Bluestein's team discovered that the number of logical qubits required for breaking these encryption algos is only about ten thousand. The key point is that these are reconfigurable, meaning that they are not fixed error-prone qubits that were crammed onto a single chip, but rather neutral atoms which can be physically repositioned in space during the quantum computation process, greatly reducing the overall amount of overhead incurred during that process.

You might say, "Okay, but that's still a lot; there are only a couple thousand physical qubits in the best quantum computing machine today." This is a fair statement; however, consider how fast the hardware will be advancing.

IBM is targeting having one hundred thousand qubits by 2033. Google, Amazon and many new start-up companies (such as Oratomic) are in a race to do the same. So when your goal goes from millions to thousands of qubits, "decades away" now becomes "years away," probably even less than that.

Remember the comments made about AI technology before it beat humans at Go, saying that AI wouldn't be able to beat a human in Go for an additional fifty years? Then in 2016, DeepMind was able to beat a human at Go. Exponential advancements in technology do not come with an invitation in the mail.

Prepare for an emotional wake-up call. ECDSA, Bitcoin’s signature scheme, and the Ethereum network use signature schemes built before quantum computers were invented. Each transaction you’ve ever completed exists on a public record that has your public key visible. A powerful enough quantum computer will not only affect transactions occurring in the future but will also be able to retroactively compromise transactions that have already taken place.

In other words, the coins you have stored in your wallet today may very well belong to someone else down the road—not through a computer hack, but rather through the use of mathematics.

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

This confluence leads us back to Bluvstein's landmark Nature paper of 2024. The paper established profound implications for blockchain security, which we flagged at the time; this is the pale reflection of that.

It is now abundantly clear: we need post-quantum cryptography for all blockchains; not at some unspecified date in the near future, but rather NOW.

On the plus side, solutions exist to meet this need: NIST has successfully published its first post-quantum standard (2024) which includes quantum-attack resistant, lattice-based and hash-based algorithms. Many blockchain projects are already leveraging one or more of these standards, while other projects remain foolishly unaware.

What you can do:

- Audit your holdings and funds from each chain; know which wallets and chains are using cryptography that will be vulnerable to post-quantum attacks.

- Persevere with your favorites – i.e., if your favorite protocol has not published a roadmap for moving to post-quantum security, find out why and communicate loudly.

The Clock Is Ticking

First, we told you about the decreased amount of time left until the end of the countdown. You now know just how reduced the time is. Research no longer remains based around theory; it now exists within hardware; the only remaining unknown variable is if the cryptocurrencies that make up the crypto ecosystem can produce products quickly enough.

A window of opportunity now exists for you to use, but all windows of opportunity will eventually close!

Stay up to date on all developments within quantum threats being made to the blockchain, and begin preparing by transferring any and all cryptocurrency out of your current address and into a new one before the mathematical algorithms move the cryptocurrency to another individual.