TLDR Tech / Crypto
Breakthrough Algorithm Improvements Target Crypto Signatures
Two research papers, one from Google Quantum AI and one from startup Oratomic, have improved Shor's algorithm for cracking 256-bit elliptic curve signatures on secp256k1, with results that compound across logical and physical quantum stack layers. Google's approach requires about 1,000 logical qubits (~500K physical with surface code) and could recover ECDSA private keys in minutes on fast superconducting hardware, while Oratomic's neutral atom method achieves the same with 26,000 physical qubits, a 40x reduction from prior state-of-the-art, at roughly 10 days per key. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, a co-author on the Google paper, now assigns at least a 10% probability to q-day arriving by 2032, a reassessment that raises urgency for Bitcoin and Ethereum developers to migrate ECDSA and Schnorr signatures to post-quantum schemes before sufficiently capable hardware exists.
Read the full story