Quantum Breakthrough: New Circuits Threaten Bitcoin and Ethereum Security

A recent collaboration between Google Quantum AI, the Ethereum Foundation, and Stanford has published a whitepaper detailing optimized quantum circuits that could break the elliptic curve cryptography underpinning Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The researchers used Shor's algorithm targeting the secp256k1 curve, which is the specific flavor of elliptic curve cryptography that both cryptocurrencies rely on. The key finding: fewer than 500,000 physical superconducting qubits would be needed, down from prior estimates of roughly 9 million.

This represents a 20-fold reduction in the hardware required to run what amounts to a skeleton key for blockchain wallets. The paper argues that this benchmark is less than half of Google's previously reported level, although the two approaches use different accounting methods.