Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are speeding up plans to shield their networks from future quantum computers, as the U.S. Commerce Department finalizes up to $100 million in awards each for Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum. Neither blockchain faces an imminent quantum threat, but both are targeting 2029 as the deadline for having a credible migration path in place.
Washington backs the hardware race
The U.S. Commerce Department finalized a CHIPS Act award worth up to $100 million each for Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum on Tuesday, taking minority stakes in the three quantum-computing companies. The funding targets scaling hardware, manufacturing and error-correction systems needed for larger, fault-tolerant machines.
That government push arrives just as Bitcoin and Ethereum developers accelerate their own defenses against a future quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptography that secures crypto wallets.
Ethereum sets a fixed deadline, Bitcoin moves in phases
Ethereum's protocol team has set December 2029 as a self-imposed deadline for making the base layer quantum-resistant across execution, consensus and data, planning as if so-called "Q-day" could arrive as early as 2030. Bitcoin has no equivalent network-wide deadline, but work has accelerated this year around Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-360, which proposes a post-quantum output type, and BIP-361, which lays out a phased migration away from today's ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. Bitcoin researchers and institutions have similarly discussed 2029 as the window by which a credible migration path needs to be in place.
No imminent threat, but a shrinking gap
None of that means a quantum computer capable of stealing bitcoin or ether is expected in 2029. Google Quantum AI estimated earlier this year that attacking 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography could require fewer than 1,200 error-corrected qubits. IBM nevertheless plans to deliver Starling, a fault-tolerant machine capable of running 100 million gates on 200 logical qubits, in 2029, while Quantinuum is targeting hundreds of logical qubits around the same period. Those figures cannot be compared directly with Google's attack estimate, but they explain why protocol developers don't want to wait until a cryptographically relevant machine exists.
Exposed keys complicate Bitcoin's migration
The migration is especially awkward for Bitcoin, because millions of coins sit in addresses whose public keys are already exposed, including an estimated 1 million BTC belonging to creator Satoshi Nakamoto. BIP-361 proposes eventually restricting legacy signatures after a migration period, a step that could strand coins belonging to users who fail to move them. Ethereum faces a different coordination problem: its foundation has a dedicated post-quantum team and a fixed target, but moving wallets, applications and users onto new signature schemes could continue beyond the base-layer upgrade.
The race, then, is not quantum computers against crypto today, but whether Bitcoin and Ethereum can replace cryptography embedded across hundreds of billions of dollars of assets before hardware engineers close a gap that keeps shrinking.
Source: CoinDesk
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