Quantum Alarm Grows As Researchers Say 10,000 Qubits Could Threaten Crypto Wallet Security
New research suggests the quantum threat to crypto wallets may be closer than many assumed, with one estimate indicating that about 10,000 physical qubits could be enough to break commonly used elliptic curve encryption under a specific architecture, while Google separately said future quantum systems might crack ECDSA-256 with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, far below its earlier estimates.  That does not mean bitcoin or ether wallets are in immediate danger today, because machines at that level do not yet exist, but it does mean the safety margin around current wallet cryptography may be shrinking faster than expected.  The main risk would fall first on wallets whose public keys are already exposed onchain, such as older or reused addresses, which is why the issue is increasingly being framed as a migration problem rather than an instant collapse scenario.  With NIST already having finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, the takeaway is that the industry still has time, but not unlimited time, to start planning safer signature schemes and wallet upgrade paths before quantum hardware becomes powerful enough to matter.