Bitcoin and Ethereum race quantum clock as U.S. backs $300 million hardware push
The U.S. government is investing $300 million into quantum computing firms to accelerate hardware development, prompting crypto protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum to prepare for potential future quantum threats. Developers are setting deadlines for quantum-resistant upgrades to protect digital assets from future decryption risks.
Why it matters
The intersection of quantum computing advancements and blockchain security represents a major long-term challenge for the future of decentralized finance.
The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday finalized a CHIPS Act award worth up to $100 million each for Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum, while taking minority stakes in the three quantum-computing companies. The money is aimed at scaling hardware, manufacturing and error-correction systems needed for larger, fault-tolerant machines.
It comes as Ethereum's protocol team has set December 2029 as a self-imposed deadline for making the base layer quantum-resistant across execution, consensus and data, planning as if the so-called “Q-day” could arrive as early as 2030.
Bitcoin has no equivalent network-wide deadline, but work has accelerated this year around Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-360, which proposes a post-quantum output type, and BIP-361, which lays out a phased migration away from today's ECDSA and Schnorr signatures.
Bitcoin researchers and institutions have similarly discussed 2029 as the window by which a credible migration path needs to be in place.
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