Hi All
A significant day in cryptography:
31 Mar 2026 – Google Quantum AI has published a 57-page whitepaper demonstrating that the quantum resources needed to break the elliptic curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin, Ethereum, and virtually every major cryptocurrency are roughly an order of magnitude smaller than previously estimated.
The paper, titled “Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mit...“ and co-authored with researchers from the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford University, presents two optimized quantum circuits for solving the 256-bit Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP-256) on the secp256k1 curve — the cryptographic foundation of Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction signatures. The circuits achieve a roughly 10x improvement in spacetime volume over the best prior single-instance estimates, translating to fewer than 500,000 physical qubits and a runtime measured in minutes on a superconducting architecture.
In a move unprecedented in quantum cryptanalysis, the team withheld the circuits themselves and instead published a cryptographic zero-knowledge proof — built with SP1 zkVM and Groth16 SNARK — allowing anyone to verify the claims without accessing the attack details. The paper was accompanied by a responsible disclosure blog post in which Google stated it had engaged with the U.S. government prior to publication and urged other quantum computing research teams to adopt similar disclosure practices.
https://postquantum.com/security-pqc/google-quantum-bitcoin-ecdlp/
Regards
Caute_Cautim
