EU Warns Quantum Computers May Break Crypto Locks

European Union financial supervisors have issued a joint warning that advances in quantum computing pose a threat to the cryptography securing blockchains. According to their risk update, quantum computers could potentially undermine systems used to secure transactions, communications, and databases.

The warning follows a more detailed assessment from Google Quantum AI, which estimated in March that breaking the cryptography used by many cryptocurrencies would require about 20 times fewer physical qubits than earlier estimates. A qubit is the basic unit of a quantum computer, and currently, no computer capable of carrying out such an attack exists.

Cryptocurrency holders are concerned that a future quantum computer could derive a private key from an exposed public key and use it to authorize transactions. Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp proposed phasing out the network's current signatures and restricting unmigrated funds five years after activation, but this proposal has not been adopted.

The Ethereum Foundation aims to make Ethereum resistant to quantum attacks across its execution, consensus, and data layers by December 2029.