Wed Jun 17 2026
The question of whether to migrate to quantum-safe cryptography has already been answered — not by vendors, but by governments writing it into law with firm dates attached.
For years, the quantum threat lived in the realm of “someday.” That era is over. As the 2025 Quantum Threat Timeline Report from evolutionQ Inc. and the Global Risk Institute makes clear, the world’s major governments have stopped treating post-quantum migration as optional and started treating it as a compliance obligation with deadlines on the calendar. If your organisation hasn’t set its own timeline yet, the regulators have effectively set one for you.
The report documents a coordinated regulatory shift already underway:
These are not aspirational targets. They are formal mandates from national and supranational authorities, and they reflect a consensus that the migration must begin now — long before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer actually exists.
The mandates exist because the underlying risk has tightened. This year’s surveyed experts are the most optimistic they have ever been about a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arriving within a decade — half of them put the likelihood at around 50% or higher within ten years, and even the report’s deliberately pessimistic reading lands at roughly 28%. A recent breakthrough has also cut the estimated qubits needed to break RSA-2048 to fewer than one million, a roughly twenty-fold reduction from earlier projections.
Layered on top is the “harvest now, decrypt later” reality: adversaries are already intercepting and storing encrypted data today to decrypt once the capability arrives. For any data with a long shelf-life, the exposure is present-tense. Governments understand that orderly migration takes years, and that a rushed, last-minute transition risks introducing fresh vulnerabilities — so they have chosen to move while there is still time to do it properly.
It’s worth being clear about what these mandates do and don’t cover. They establish the minimum: government departments and critical infrastructure operators must act. But the threat doesn’t respect the boundary of who is formally regulated. The report explicitly notes that even organisations not yet officially required to adopt PQC benefit from a proactive stance, reducing the risk of a scramble later.
For anyone holding sensitive AI workloads or digital assets, the regulatory timeline is best read as an early warning rather than a limit. Where governments lead on critical systems, expectations for the broader market — and for the partners and platforms those markets depend on — follow.
All of these roadmaps converge on the same technical foundation: the post-quantum cryptography standards finalised by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — FIPS 203, 204, and 205. Issued in 2024, these are now the global benchmark for quantum-safe security, and they are what compliance will ultimately be measured against.
That makes alignment with NIST standards the practical test of whether a quantum-safe solution is ready for the regulatory environment now taking shape — not a roadmap promise, but a verifiable foundation.
01 Quantum’s technology is engineered around exactly the benchmark these mandates point to. Its IronCAP™ post-quantum cryptography is designed to align with NIST FIPS 203, 204, and 205, giving organisations a foundation that maps directly to the compliance environment now emerging.
On the AI side, 01 Quantum’s Quantum AI Wrapper (QAW) uses fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to bring artificial intelligence workloads into a quantum-safe operating environment — protecting models and the sensitive, long-shelf-life data they process, which represents the largest and fastest-growing body of information now exposed to harvest-now-decrypt-later capture.
On the digital assets side, the Quantum Crypto Wrapper (QCW) and Quantum DeFi Wrapper (QDW) extend quantum-safe protection to existing assets and decentralised applications across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid — preserving the chains organisations already rely on while closing the quantum vulnerability.
This work is powered by patent-pending technology (US #63/832787) and reinforced by strategic advisor Dr. Edoardo Persichetti, a NIST post-quantum standardisation contributor and co-author of the HQC algorithm selected in NIST’s process. The result is a set of working, standards-aligned solutions available today — while much of the market is still waiting to see whether the deadlines really apply to them.
The governments setting these mandates are not given to alarmism. Their deadlines reflect a sober assessment that the migration is large, slow, and best started early. The organisations that treat April 2026 and the 2030–2031 horizon as their own planning markers — rather than someone else’s problem — are the ones that will transition on their terms instead of under pressure.
The regulators have already drawn the timeline; the only open question is whether your AI workloads and digital assets will be protected in time, and the standards-aligned tools to do it exist today.