The world could be caught off guard by quantum hackers before the end of this decade — much sooner than expected. This is the take-home message of two studies posted independently on 30 March, one a white paper by a team at Google 1 and the other a preprint from Oratomic 2 , a start-up company in Pasadena, California.

Nature 652 , 552-553 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01054-1

References

Babbush, R. et al. Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations (Google Quantum AI, 2026); available at https://quantumai.google/static/site-assets/downloads/cryptocurrency-whitepaper.pdf

Cain, M. et al.…