Quantum Advances Spur Urgent PQC Adoption

Rapid advances in quantum computing—including a reported verified quantum speed‑up from Google’s Willow chip—have intensified warnings that Bitcoin’s elliptic‑curve cryptography and other long‑lived secrets could be at risk within roughly 2–10 years. Governments, standards bodies and firms are accelerating responses: NIST selected CRYSTALS‑Kyber, CRYSTALS‑Dilithium and SPHINCS+, policies such as CNSA 2.0, executive orders and EU timelines set migration windows, and the U.S. is increasing support for quantum technology firms. Developers and security teams have proposed technical fixes—including Bitcoin Improvement Proposals to migrate signatures to post‑quantum schemes and hybrid approaches—and industry is beginning to ship hardware implementations of NIST‑approved algorithms (for example, SEALSQ’s QS7001 chip, slated for commercial availability in November 2025 with TPM variants planned). Security leaders urge treating “harvest‑now, decrypt‑later” as an immediate cross‑sector risk while migrations face substantial technical and community hurdles (hard forks, moving legacy funds). Some cryptographers caution that practical cryptographic breaks remain years away, but faster quantum demonstrations, regulatory timelines and institutional exposures have elevated post‑quantum cryptography and privacy preservation to near‑term strategic priorities for Bitcoin and broader markets.