Quantum computers could break crypto wallet encryption with just 10,000 qubits, researchers say
The research shows quantum computers may break bitcoin and ether wallet encryption with far fewer qubits than previously thought, accelerating the push toward post-quantum security.
What to know:
- A research paper from Caltech and quantum startup Oratomic found that the cryptography protecting bitcoin and ether wallets could be broken with as few as 10,000 physical qubits, far below earlier estimates of hundreds of thousands.
- Using Google’s quantum circuits as a baseline, the authors say a neutral-atom quantum computer with about 26,000 qubits could crack ECC-256, the standard securing major blockchains, in roughly 10 days, while RSA-2048 would require about 102,000 qubits and three months.
- The findings, which come with conflicts of interest for the Oratomic-affiliated authors, underscore that the main question now is whether the crypto industry can migrate to quantum-resistant systems before the cost of quantum attacks falls further.
The quantum computing power required to break the encryption that secures blockchains continues to decline, at least in theory, raising the question of whether the industry can migrate to quantum-resistant platforms before they become vulnerable at an affordable cost.
A new paper by Caltech and quantum startup Oratomic suggests a system with around 26,000 qubits could break ECC-256, the encryption standard that secures the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, in about 10 days. RSA-2048, used by financial institutions to secure their Web2 platforms, is more challenging, they found.
The researchers found the cryptography protecting bitcoin and ether (ETH) wallets could be broken using as few as 10,000 physical qubits, collapsing prior estimates that until this week still ran into the hundreds of thousands.
Qubits are the basic units of quantum computers, similar to bits in traditional machines. They are a measure not of speed, like gigahertz or teraflops, but rather reflect the scale of the system, closer to the number of cores or transistors in a chip.
The paper, posted Monday to the arXiv preprint server, landed alongside a Google Quantum AI whitepaper that pegged the threshold at fewer than 500,000 physical qubits.
