Fri Jun 05 2026
The people building quantum computers have just told us they expect to break today’s encryption sooner than ever before — and the entire digital asset economy is still running on cryptography that has no defence against it. The 2025 Quantum Threat Timeline Report, published by evolutionQ Inc. and the Global Risk Institute, surveyed 26 of the world’s leading quantum computing experts — the researchers, engineers, and company leaders actually building these machines. Their verdict is the most significant data point the industry has produced this year: this is the most optimistic the expert community has ever been about a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arriving within a decade.
Half of the surveyed experts (13 of 26) now estimate the likelihood of a quantum computer capable of breaking RSA-2048 within ten years at around 50% or higher. Even under the report’s deliberately pessimistic interpretation — taking the lowest probability compatible with each expert’s answer — the average likelihood of the threat materialising within ten years already sits at roughly 28%. By the fifteen-year mark, that pessimistic average climbs to 51%.
This is not a fringe forecast or a vendor’s marketing claim. It is the considered judgement of the academic and industrial community closest to the technology, and it represents a clear upward shift from previous years — driven by recent breakthroughs in quantum error correction and a landmark result showing that breaking RSA-2048 may now require fewer than one million physical qubits, a roughly twenty-fold reduction from earlier estimates.
Here is the part most organisations miss: you do not have until the machine is built. Adversaries are already intercepting and storing encrypted data today, intending to decrypt it the moment a capable quantum computer becomes available — a strategy the security community calls “harvest now, decrypt later.”
For digital assets, this is uniquely dangerous. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid all expose public keys during transactions. Data captured today is data that can be unlocked tomorrow. The report frames this through the Mosca Inequality: if the time needed to migrate your systems, plus the length of time your data must stay secure, exceeds the time until the threat arrives, you are already exposed — regardless of when “the machine” actually appears.
The transition to quantum-safe systems must therefore begin well before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists. Testing, validation, and deployment across complex ecosystems take years.
While the experts move their estimates forward and governments set hard deadlines — Canada requires every federal department to draft a post-quantum migration plan by April 2026, and the EU requires member states to begin deploying post-quantum encryption this year — most of the digital asset world remains in “wait and see” mode.
That gap between the threat curve and the response curve is precisely the exposure that the report warns about. Waiting for certainty is not a strategy; by the time the threat is undeniable, the window to migrate in an orderly way will already have closed.
01 Quantum has spent years preparing for exactly this moment. Its IronCAP™ post-quantum cryptography is engineered to align with the finalised NIST standards — FIPS 203, 204, and 205 — that now serve as the global benchmark for quantum-safe security. The approach is deliberately practical: rather than asking organisations to rebuild from scratch, 01 Quantum brings quantum-safe protection to the systems they already rely on.
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. As AI systems ingest ever-larger volumes of data, they represent by far the largest and fastest-growing target for harvest-now-decrypt-later capture.
On the digital assets side, the Quantum Crypto Wrapper (QCW) and Quantum DeFi Wrapper (QDW) extend the same quantum-safe protection to existing assets and decentralised applications across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid — preserving the chains organisations rely on while closing the quantum vulnerability.
All of this is powered by patent-pending technology (US #63/832787) and reinforced by the counsel of strategic advisor Dr. Edoardo Persichetti, a NIST post-quantum standardisation contributor and co-author of HQC, one of the algorithms selected in NIST’s process.
These are not roadmap promises. They are working demonstrations of readiness, available while much of the industry is still debating whether to act.
The report’s authors are careful, measured scientists who stress genuine uncertainty. That makes their conclusion all the more striking: from a risk-management perspective, the responsible move is to act now, not when the threat becomes obvious. The likelihood is high enough, the consequences severe enough, and the migration slow enough that delay is itself the gamble.
The experts have moved their clock forward. The only question is whether your organisation moves with it.
The people building the threat have told us how close it is — and the quantum-safe solutions to protect both your AI workloads and your digital assets already exist today.