A whitepaper published on March 30 by Google Quantum AI has dramatically compressed the estimated timeline for quantum computers to break the elliptic-curve cryptography that secures virtually every major blockchain — and the crypto industry is scrambling to assess the fallout.
The paper was co-authored by Google researchers Ryan Babbush and Hartmut Neven alongside Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh. It concludes that breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem underpinning Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction signatures would require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, roughly a 20-fold reduction from previous estimates that placed the threshold in the millions.
"We want to raise awareness on this issue and are providing the cryptocurrency community with recommendations to improve security and stability before this is possible," the Google researchers wrote in an accompanying blog post.
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