Standard
A 256-bit elliptic curve standard used for ECDSA digital signatures in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Ava Labs has an internal group studying hash-based signatures as a fallback for Avalanche's ECDSA, CEO Emin Gun Sirer said on October 9. Nothing is scheduled for the protocol, so the effort is a hedge against a failure Sirer ranks behind ordinary code bugs.
Reality
UC San Diego and Inria researchers forged a 1024-bit RSA signature through an HSM in 1,380 core-years, against at least 500,000 to factor the key. The attack only works with raw, unpadded signing access, so how exposed a custodian is depends on how its HSM is configured.
Reality
The construction runs inside today's Script limits, so no soft fork was needed. The cost of quantum defence moves instead onto the individual holder, at $75 to $150 per transaction.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Eigen Labs' ECDSA.Fail leaderboard took the resource score for one step of a quantum key recovery from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion by July 26, while the defense side works to fixed dates in 2029 and 2030.
Reality
Eigen Labs' ECDSA.Fail contest drove a point-addition resource score from 10.75 billion down to 1.496 billion. Neither IonQ nor Google has built the machine, and the end-to-end attack estimates that matter are still theirs.
Reality
The algorithm-level numbers are the part of the estimate that can be recompiled onto any fault-tolerant machine, and the headline 25.7 days on 19,397 physical qubits belongs to the trapped-ion architecture its own authors proposed.
Reality
IonQ's September 8 paper puts one secp256k1 key at just under 26 days on 20,000 physical qubits. The company's roadmap reaches 10,000 fault-tolerant qubits in 2027 and names no year for the larger machine.
Reality
Superion 256 opens for orders with deliveries due in 2027. The six tapeouts IonQ ran in half a year say more about whether its 2028 fault-tolerance date is real than the qubit count does.
Reality
The 26-day figure is a runtime rather than a date, and it works out to one logical Toffoli every 57.6 milliseconds on trapped-ion hardware whose scale IonQ's roadmap does not reach until 2028. No error rates are published to check it.
Reality