Before Q-Day: The Race to Quantum First
On March 30, 2026, two independent research teams significantly lowered public estimates for breaking encryption that secures banking, communications, and classified traffic. One team demonstrated that Shor's algorithm, the quantum method for factoring large numbers behind public-key encryption, could run at cryptographically relevant scale with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits. Separately, Google Quantum AI, in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford University, established a new threshold for breaking elliptic-curve encryption. These advances shorten the timeline to 'Q-Day'—the point when quantum computers can break current encryption standards—prompting urgency in the race to develop quantum-resistant cryptography.
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