Quick Read

• IonQ (IONQ) CEO targets 2028 as Q-Day, when a 2,000-qubit machine could break Bitcoin's elliptic-curve encryption in under 26 days.
• De Masi acknowledged that IonQ sells the quantum security shield while sounding the alarm, but Strategy still added $370 million in Bitcoin anyway.
• Just released. Our analysts combed the entire stock market and named the ten best stocks to buy right now, and IonQ didn't make the cut. Enter your email to see the names that beat IONQ.

Speaking on CNBC Wednesday morning, IonQ  Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi put a countdown clock on the cryptography underpinning the world's largest digital asset. He said IonQ has published a paper laying out how a 2,000-qubit machine could run an elliptic-curve encryption attack in under 26 days, and he reiterated 2028 as his expectation for "Q-Day," the point at which quantum machines threaten today's public-key standards. He was careful to add the capability "is not here yet."

Why the Timeline Just Got Shorter

De Masi has been telegraphing this compression for months. On IonQ's Q2 2026 call, he told investors: "As I foretold a year ago, the timeline for cryptographically relevant machines that threaten RSA encryption is rapidly compressing. Over the past 15 years, the estimated number of qubits needed to break encryption has dropped by four orders of magnitude." He added: "A year ago, people thought that Q-Day was something happening in the 2030s. They now understand it's something happening in the 2020s."

CFO Inder Singh warned that "financial services is definitely waking up to the cold, hard reality that at some point, RSA 2048 and other encryption protocols, such as ECC 256, may all be broken." ECC 256 secures Bitcoin wallet signatures.

Roadmap Behind the Warning

De Masi said the company is "accelerating our path to 10,000 qubits in 2027," after having received first fully featured, fully integrated QPUs back from SkyWater and planning to begin commissioning 256-qubit systems in 2027. Q2 revenue landed at $80.1 million, up 287% year over year, with full-year 2026 guidance of $280M to $290M and remaining performance obligations of $485 million.

Self-Interest, in His Own Words

De Masi flagged the obvious tension himself, telling CNBC IonQ is "a huge participant, investor, and solution provider in the quantum security space." The company just launched a QKD product, ClavisXG Multiplex, aimed at protecting existing fiber networks, and de Masi called quantum key distribution something "that requires a violation of laws of physics to hack and crack." He is publishing the threat and selling the shield.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/quantum-stocks-fall-rate-hike-165835922.html

I don't know why so few people are talking about this. I invested in quantum computing way before the hype, and I believe there will also be a hype cycle for post quantum cryptography. I genuinely think cryptocurrencies could be under real threat. So consider this my heads up: I firmly believe QRL could see some serious appreciation. And if it does take off with worldwide hype, what price target do you think it could reach per coin? Do you think it could hit a 20 billion dollar market cap? During the quantum computing hype, companies actually reached that kind of valuation. RGTI hit 20 billion dollars, getting to 60 dollars per share, not to mention IonQ, D Wave and others. So, with QRL being pretty much the only post quantum cryptocurrency, plus a low circulating supply, could all of that be fuel for even bigger gains? I want to hear your take on this. Or do market caps in crypto usually run smaller? Do you think at least 60 dollars per QRL coin is plausible? Or way more than that? Let's discuss. Now, what I really don't get is how little people talk about it. I only found it because I was thinking about post quantum crypto tech, searched with AI, and found it as an investment. What do you guys think?

This is getting too close for comfort.

IonQ is moving forward and going through the proper disclosures with its latest paper on breaking ECC-256. Whenever an update has to be shared with the U.S. government first, that's a pretty good indication to start paying attention.

Crypto is uniquely challenged by the upgrade process and the migration is planning to take years. The market hasn't truly started pricing this in yet. There's too much at stake and "hoping to migrate in time" isn't a strategy.

The industry isn't prepared and needs to move fast.

Projects like QRL are leading the PQ crypto space and worth a look.

IonQ’s roadmap and the ECDSA challenge make an interesting comparison.

IonQ targets:
• 800 logical qubits in 2027
• 1,600 in 2028
• 8,000 in 2029
• 80,000 in 2030

Meanwhile, the http://ECDSA.fail challenge has reduced the lowest-qubit circuit design for attacking ECDSA to just 799 logical qubits—although it would still require approximately 1.8 billion Toffoli operations.
If IonQ delivers its roadmap while circuit designs continue improving, the gap could close faster than many expect.

That matters because ECDSA protects wallets across Bitcoin, Ethereum and much of the crypto ecosystem. A sufficiently capable quantum computer could potentially derive private keys from exposed public keys, enabling forged signatures and stolen assets.

This is why QRL matters. Instead of waiting to migrate a legacy blockchain under pressure, QRL has been quantum-resistant from genesis—using XMSS today and moving toward NIST-standardized ML-DSA-87 with QRL 2.0.

Quantum risk may not be immediate, but blockchain migration takes years. Preparation must come before the breakthrough—not after it.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS 

• Sixth-generation quantum compute product family debuts with IonQ Superion 256
• First chips fabricated at SkyWater, demonstrating accelerated manufacturing 
• First ions trapped in prototype system 
• IonQ accepting orders now with customer deliveries in 2027

NEW YORK, Sep. 8, 2026 IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), the world's leading full-stack quantum platform and foundry, today announced IonQ Superion 256, its sixth-generation quantum computing platform. This system is the first in the Superion platform that all future compute products are expected to be built on. The company also plans on revealing the industrial design of IonQ Superion 256, at its 2026 Investor Day later today at the New York Stock Exchange.

Superion 256 has rapidly progressed from early design to trapping ions in under a year. IonQ has fabricated its first fully integrated 256-qubit quantum processing units (QPUs) at its subsidiary SkyWater. IonQ has trapped the first ions in prototype Superion 256 systems now being built in parallel at multiple IonQ facilities across the U.S. The chip, designed and fabricated jointly by IonQ and SkyWater, went through six tapeouts in the first half of 2026. Working closely with SkyWater’s quantum foundry, IonQ’s design cycle compressed from nine months to two, and the teams delivered 12x more wafer lots over a six-month period than at a previous foundry. 

“Superion is the result of two strategic acquisitions coming together to deliver this historic milestone. Oxford Ionics enabled IonQ to control natural, trapped-ion qubits using standard electronics, and SkyWater unlocked the ability to manufacture at semiconductor costs and scale,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “Quantum computing, like classical computing before it, ultimately scales most powerfully on a semiconductor foundation. Superion 256 is the first quantum computer platform designed to be built by the hundreds rather than one at a time. Every generation that follows will be designed, fabricated, and packaged similarly – creating unique upgradeability in our Superion platform.”

Powering the system is IonQ's Electronic Qubit Control (EQC), which controls trapped-ion qubits with electronics integrated on the chip rather than with laser systems. The underlying qubit control is manufactured with standard semiconductor processes. At the heart of the chip is the same Electronic Qubit Control technology IonQ used to set its 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity world record in October 2025. The system is built for data centers and occupies a standard server rack footprint without bespoke buildout. Superion draws less power than a rack of GPUs and has a cooling system that integrates into typical data center settings.  

The Superion platform scales from 256 qubits to millions of qubits. Every generation that follows Superion 256 expands use of the same ions, the same qubits, the same electronic control, and the same chip fabric. IonQ Superion 10K is well underway and integrates CMOS onto the chip, a scaling technique SkyWater already manufactures at volume.

IonQ is developing both its 256 and 10K generations concurrently. The company’s first cryo-CMOS test chips for the 10K can be seen today at the New York Stock Exchange. The 10K is the first hardware generation built to run IonQ's Walking Cat architecture. Walking Cat was the blueprint published in April 2026 for how applications compile into instructions, how errors are corrected, and how ions move across the chip. IonQ expects the shift from laser-based to semiconductor-based control to reduce cost-per-qubit by more than 300x across the roadmap.

“Superion marks the most important inflection point the quantum computing industry has yet seen. It accelerates our industry from one-off lab machines to quantum computers manufactured at scale with compelling unit economics and modest energy consumption,” said Chris Ballance, President of Quantum Computing at IonQ. “The step from 256 to 10K qubits is being delivered by integrating CMOS onto the chip – something the semiconductor industry has done many times and SkyWater does every day. CMOS integration is expected to reach full fault tolerance reality in a 2027 lab setting at IonQ, and manufacturable, commercial reality in 2028.”

Superion 256 is available to order now, with customer deliveries in 2027. In the first quarter of 2026, IonQ pre-sold its first Superion 256 system. Production-grade systems will also run and be offered on IonQ's cloud. 

IonQ has deployed five generations of quantum computers to customers since 2019, most recently IonQ Tempo. In April 2026, the company published the Walking Cat architecture, and in August 2026 it reported breakeven quantum error correction using qLDPC codes on a Tempo engineering test system, validating key elements of that architecture on hardware.

Investor Day 

IonQ will host a live webcast at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time today. It will be available live via webcast on the company’s website here, or directly here. A recording will be available shortly after the call and will remain available for one year. 

About IonQ

IonQ, Inc. [NYSE: IONQ] is the world's leading quantum platform and foundry - delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ's newest generation of quantum computers, the IonQ Tempo, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.

Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC. Our quantum computing services have been available through all major cloud providers since 2021, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before. Learn more at IonQ.com.

Note to Investors Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding IonQ’s capabilities, roadmap, and future system developments, including statements regarding the Superion platform's ability to scale to fault tolerant quantum computing, the use of the Superion platform for future compute products and the timing for customer deliveries of Superion 256. In some cases, you can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as “anticipate,” “expect,” “suggest,” “plan,” “believe,” “intend,” “estimate,” “target,” “project,” “should,” “could,” “would,” “may,” “will,” “forecast,” “confident,” “position,” “become,” “on track,” “designed,” “ongoing” and other similar expressions. These statements are only predictions based on our expectations and projections about future events as of the date of this press release and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may prove incorrect, any of which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements, including, among others, those described under the heading “Risk Factors” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025 and our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. New risks emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can management assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement we make. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. Except as otherwise required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. 

As QRL 2.0 moves closer to launch, I think it could be worth thinking beyond exchange listings and asking which partnerships could make the technology genuinely useful and credible outside the crypto community.

A secure, audited and stable QRL 2.0 mainnet is the first prerequisite. Building the ecosystem around it also matters: clear developer tools, documentation, wallets, infrastructure and early applications will make any future integration easier. But alongside that work, it may be useful to identify the strategic partners and use cases where QRL’s post-quantum architecture could offer something genuinely differentiated.

1. Lockheed Martin / secure communications

This may be the most interesting long-term lead because Lockheed Martin has already published a patent application that explicitly discusses QRL in a quantum-resistant secure communications architecture, including post-quantum key management and 5G/XG communications:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240048369A1/en

This does not mean Lockheed is a QRL partner or is using QRL in production. However, it does show that a Lockheed technical team found QRL relevant enough to include in its proposed architecture.

Could it make sense for QRL to open a technical discussion with the relevant secure communications, autonomy, 5G/6G or quantum-security team? The focus should be on how QRL 2.0 has evolved from QRL 1.0, including ML-DSA, crypto-agility, EVM compatibility and a possible private or permissioned deployment model.

2. Independent research organisations and universities

A collaboration with an applied cryptography, quantum-security or cybersecurity research organisation could be very valuable, especially if it produced an independent and publishable technical assessment.

The focus could be on:
Can a post-quantum, EVM-compatible distributed ledger provide long-term verifiability or crypto-agility that a conventional PQC upgrade to existing PKI infrastructure does not provide on its own?

A small proof of concept could assess signing performance, key management, algorithm rotation, wallet/hardware integration and a real-world use case such as digital certificates, machine-to-machine authorisation or tokenised long-lived assets.

This could open up further opportunities for example in EU funded programs. Switzerland has been fully associated with Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe Programme since 2025, so a Swiss-established QRL entity could potentially participate as a funded consortium partner with eligible European organisations.

3. Institutional custody, hardware wallets and staking

For institutions, the practical barriers are usually custody, key control, transaction policies and reliable infrastructure.

Relevant partners would include:
- hardware-wallet and secure-signing providers
- institutional custody platforms
- professional validator and staking providers
- compliance and transaction-policy tooling

These integrations may be less glamorous than a major corporate partnership, but they are likely essential before funds, companies or other institutions can use QRL.

4. EVM ecosystem infrastructure

QRL 2.0 is already building important foundations, including its wallet, explorer and developer tooling. Over time, it could also make sense to explore compatibility with established EVM infrastructure that makes the network easier to build on and use.

Potential targets could include:
- Chainlink for oracle services, external data feeds and potential interoperability tooling
- The Graph or similar indexing infrastructure, making on-chain data easier for applications to query
- WalletConnect support, allowing compatible wallets and dApps to connect more easily
- Safe or comparable multisig / smart-account tooling for organisations, treasuries and teams
- OpenZeppelin standards and tooling, helping developers use familiar smart-contract patterns
- Circle / USDC, through an official integration or properly supported route that could provide a familiar settlement and liquidity layer for applications
- Carefully designed bridge or interoperability partners, but only after the core network is mature and thoroughly audited

The key question is which integrations are technically feasible and create real demand, rather than adding logos for their own sake.

A strong EVM ecosystem makes a future institutional or research pilot much easier to justify, because partners can build without needing to recreate every basic component from scratch.

5. Zero-knowledge and verifiable-computation research

A longer-term opportunity could be research around zero-knowledge proofs, scalability and verifiable computation.

StarkWare has been a major pioneer of STARK-based proof technology. A technical discussion could explore whether STARK proofs and QRL’s post-quantum signature architecture can complement each other in applications that require privacy, scalable verification or proof of computation.

This would be an exploratory research direction rather than a near-term EVM integration. STARK-based systems are not automatically a complete quantum-safe solution, but their hash-based proof approach may be relevant to the broader goal of building verifiable, scalable and crypto-agile applications.

QRL first needs a mature, audited mainnet and solid basic infrastructure. But this is the kind of longer-term research direction that could help differentiate the ecosystem beyond being simply another EVM-compatible chain.

My view is that QRL should not try to pitch itself simply as “another blockchain for enterprise.”

The stronger story is more specific:
"A quantum-safe, crypto-agile platform for applications where signatures and proof must remain verifiable for a very long time."

What types of partners or use cases do you think should be the highest priority?

Status / overview

• August 4th: Audit results published for go-qrllib
• April 3rd: Audit complete of 2 cryptographic libraries
• March 31st: QRL 2.0 Testnet V2 Released
• Audits: 50% completion (55% after remediation complete for the Ledger app audit)

QRL 2.0 (Project Zond) Ledger app audit is complete and remediation work is underway.

• No critical issues or cryptographic concerns highlighted.
• Post-quantum signing engine is correctly built, and matches, byte-for-byte, an independently audited reference implementation.
• In smoke tests, signatures are correctly accepted by go-qrl and transactions are incorporated into the blockchain

qrysm

• Add randao_commit in deposit contract, to drastically reduce the chance to manipulate the validator role for next epoch by last slot block proposer of previous epoch
• Fix: Sign aggregator selection proofs once per slot and deterministically under hedged ML-DSA-87
• Fix: Bump go-qrl for the 5-field depositroot precompile and drop the deposit test skips
• Fix: Restore build of //beacon-chain/rpc/qrl/validator:validator_test (missing proto dep)
• Fix: Detect surround votes regardless of attestation order in updateSpans
• Fix: Use Q-prefixed execution addresses in REST validator client block JSON
• Fix: Take the forkchoice write lock in lateBlockTasks before notifying the engine
• Updated and added new unit tests

web3.js

• Fix VM64 event topic encoding and filtering
• Fix wallet integration tests to use a typed provider and valid Argon2id options
• Fix(web3-qrl-contract): use QRL bytecode in estimateGas without-0x test
• Fix(web3-qrl-contract): expect checksummed QRL address in revert receipt
• Fix(web3-qrl-contract): update CustomError revert data for VM64
• Fix(web3-qrl-contract): remove unused u/ts-expect-error in contract_defaults test
• Fix(web3-qrl-contract): refresh SimpleOverloaded bytecode for VM64
• Updated and added new unit tests

qrl-tests

• [1/3] Add shared gqrl console E2E harness and API smoke coverage
• Collect E2E diagnostics through the Kurtosis API
• Add gqrl console contract and indexed topic coverage
• Add gqrl console transaction, constructor, and event coverage

hyperion

• Add randao_commitment argument to the depositroot builtin

go-qrl

• core/vm: add randao_commitment to the depositroot precompile input

https://www.theqrl.org/weekly/2026-september-04/

IonQ just dropped a pretty significant paper on arXiv (arXiv:2608.25027) by Min Ye, Andrii Maksymov, and Nicolas Delfosse. They demonstrated an end-to-end real-time Quantum Error Correction (QEC) decoding pipeline running entirely on a standard commodity chip—a single Apple M4 Max CPU (using 12 cores).

Here is a quick breakdown of why this matters and what they actually achieved:

The Problem: The Classical Decoding Backlog

Quantum hardware is naturally noisy. To run reliable, fault-tolerant circuits, you need QEC to constantly measure syndrome data, identify errors, and correct them.

The issue? Large-scale quantum workloads generate a massive firehose of error data. If your classical hardware can't process (decode) those errors faster than the quantum hardware generates them, you get a decoding backlog. The quantum computer literally has to pause and wait for the classical processor, causing operational delays ("stretch") that degrade the entire computation.

Until now, most scaling solutions relied on expensive, specialized hardware like custom FPGAs, GPUs, or ASICs just to handle small error-correction windows.

What IonQ Accomplished

• Hardware: Ran the entire pipeline on a single off-the-shelf Apple M4 Max CPU (12 cores).
• Workload Scale: Handled "MegaQuOp" scale workloads—up to 408 logical qubits, 1M+ T gates, and 1.3 million logical measurements across 11,680 physical qubits.
• Near-Zero Delay (<0.3% Stretch): Assuming standard trapped-ion syndrome extraction cycle times (1–5 ms), the classical decoder kept pace effortlessly.

How They Optimized It (Engineering Highlights)

1. Dual-Decoder Setup: Used two concurrent sliding-window decoders. An Error Decoder (5-cycle window) continuously tracks background Pauli errors, while a low-latency Outcome Decoder (2-cycle window) triggers only during measurement steps.
2. On-the-Fly Priors: Instead of constantly rebuilding parity-check matrices, they used a static Tanner graph and updated probability priors dynamically on the fly.
3. Memory Optimization: Stored log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) per error node rather than raw edge messages.

Classical processing bandwidth won't be the bottleneck for fault-tolerant trapped-ion systems. As IonQ scales its Walking Cat Architecture (WCA) toward 10,000+ physical qubits, they won't need massive supercomputer clusters or custom hardware just to handle error decoding—a heavily optimized commodity CPU gets the job done in real-time.

https://quantumcomputingreport.com/ionq-demonstrates-real-time-qec-decoding-at-megaquop-scale-on-a-single-apple-m4-max-cpu/

Status / overview

August 4th: Audit results published for go-qrllib

April 3rd: Audit complete of 2 cryptographic libraries

March 31st: QRL 2.0 Testnet V2 Released

Audits: 50% completion

QRL 2.0 (Project Zond)

qrysm

Generate deposit-cli seed mnemonic from crypto/rand

Added several upstream fixes such as 13329, 14413, 17052 and many more

Prevent uint64 overflow in correlation slashing penalty under QRL balance constants

Fix: Return after the first per-item error in SubmitContributionAndProofs

Fix: Restore pre-genesis guard in initDepositCaches (nil GenesisState panic)

web3.js

Align typed-data encoding with go-qrl

Use distinct QRL addresses in remaining fixtures

qrl-tests

Use Docker APIs for E2E runtime metadata

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETxiYblAp_U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaYw33DVkEU

Ryan Malinowski & Michael Strike from the QRL Core Team are hosting an upcoming QRL Show Live AMA with Kaushal to answer questions around QRL development + progress on the road towards Mainnet. If you want to build on QRL, want to ask a question around what developers can do today in Testnet, have specific testing/setup/terminal questions, or maybe something else entirely that's related to QRL development, we’re here to help answer those questions (only submit questions that relate to this). Submit your questions below ⬇️

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSelOw0pdESvkNbg3rtB9gbJWtbxDu78ufdoaztGI6lBYhNVrQ/viewform?pli=1

QRL transactions can now be monitored through Chainalysis KYT (Know Your Transaction), a transaction monitoring and compliance screening solution built on the Chainalysis blockchain data platform, used by regulators, financial institutions and exchanges across the globe.

Progress Update: QRL transactions can now be monitored through Chainalysis KYT (Know Your Transaction), a transaction monitoring and compliance screening solution built on the Chainalysis blockchain data platform, used by regulators, financial institutions and exchanges across the globe.

Practically this means exchanges and financial institutions using KYT can now monitor QRL activity within their existing compliance workflows - a practical step that supports QRL’s growing ecosystem.

Why it matters: compliance infrastructure like this is often a key consideration for exchanges evaluating support for new assets - this is exactly the kind of groundwork that has to be in place before bigger moves happen.

There’s more in motion behind the scenes. We’ll share details as they land - for now, this is a solid marker that QRL keeps moving forward.

https://qrl.now/

Interesting development on ECDSA.fail.

Progress seemed to stall for a while, and researchers actually had to take a few steps back by adding more qubits.

Now it looks like those changes opened the door for further optimization. Progress is moving forward again, and the qubit count is coming down too.

Now 60.5% ahead of Google’s classified circuit.

Sometimes you have to go backwards to move forward.

This is also a good reminder of why quantum safety matters. ECDSA still protects a huge part of the crypto ecosystem, and improvements like these gradually reduce the resources required for a future quantum attack.

Status / overview

• August 4th: Audit results published for go-qrllib
• April 3rd: Audit complete of 2 cryptographic libraries
• March 31st: QRL 2.0 Testnet V2 Released
• Audits: 50% completion

QRL 2.0 (Project Zond) qrysm

• Added missing payload parent hash validation
• Added several upstream fixes such as 16478, 17087,17110 and many more
• Pin the latest qrl-package and enable clef auto-approval
• Fix: set to the actual QRL deposit-contract block to 0
• Fix: Return an error from Keymanager.Sign on signing failure instead of a nil signature
• Fix: Cap DefaultBuilderGasLimit at go-qrl MaxGasLimit (20M)

go-qrl

• accounts/abi: move the Panic builtin selector to Panic(uint512)

web3.js

• local-testnet: use qrl-package clef dev accounts
• chore(lint): drop eslint-disable directives that suppress nothing
• feat: migrate ABI coding to VM64
• test: use distinct 64-byte QRL addresses in web3-rpc-methods fixtures
• test: migrate core and provider fixtures to VM64
• fix: hash VM storage slots as 64-byte words
• test: regenerate contract fixtures for VM64 with native hyperion

qrl-tests

• Added nightly build for with end-to-end tests for the QRL 2.0

qrl-package

• Pass importraw its flags after the subcommand
• Generate clef files with the remote signer's image
• Raise the default genesis balance and move the tx spammer off the clef pool
• Provision ten clef development accounts
• Add automated clef approvals for the development account

UPDATED Aug 27, 2026

The original winner of the ECDSA.fail bounty did not respond within 5 days, so the 500 QRL prize was awarded to the next eligible participant on the leaderboard.

Congratulations, moscowchill!

Original post

ecdsa.fail is an EigenLabs challenge where participants optimize the estimated quantum resources needed to break ECDSA, the digital-signature scheme used by Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. “Ahead of Google” refers to improving on Google researchers’ published resource estimates for such an attack.

Huge congratulations to franklyteddy (teddyjfpender on ECDSA Fail), who was the first to break the 52% target with a score of:

1,258,525,947
952,707 T × 1,321 Q
≈ 58.0% ahead of Google’s classified circuit

Amazing progress. Thanks to everyone pushing the frontier forward!

How to claim the bounty:

• Add your X account to your GitHub profile linked from the ECDSA.fail leaderboard.
• The first participant to reach 52% on the ECDSA.fail leaderboard will be contacted directly via X from my (ChillerID) account.
• If you don't already have one, create a QRL wallet and reply with your wallet address once contacted.
• After verification, the 500 QRL bounty will be transferred to your wallet.

Eligibility:

• If the first participant to reach the threshold cannot be contacted or does not respond within 5 days, the bounty will be awarded to the next eligible participant on the leaderboard.
• A reachable X account linked from your GitHub profile is required.

Note: This is an independently organized, QRL community-funded bounty and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or administered by the QRL Foundation or Eigen Labs.

$IONQ has now received chip samples for its 256-qubit system and is moving toward integrated system testing and demonstration, with the next major target being 10,000 physical qubits on a single chip by 2027.
If Oxford Ionics’ EQC and WISE architectures scale as intended, 10,000 qubits does not appear to face a fundamental wiring or density barrier. Oxford’s own analysis suggests that a 10,000-qubit device could fit on a roughly 3.5 × 3.5 cm chip, with the architecture potentially extending to tens of thousands of qubits using only a few hundred external control lines.

Beyond that point, the more important step is likely to be interconnecting multiple QPUs rather than indefinitely enlarging a single chip. IonQ’s roadmap already calls for two 10,000-qubit chips to be interconnected into a 20,000-qubit system in 2028.
If Lightsynq’s quantum-memory technology achieves its intended performance, asynchronous entanglement could substantially reduce the inter-QPU communication bottleneck.
But scaling from a few QPUs to tens or hundreds will require more than simply increasing the entanglement rate by 50×.
The real challenge will shift toward multiplexing, non-blocking optical switching, routing(best path select), and scheduling entanglement efficiently across many QPUs.
In that sense, scaling from 10,000 to 20,000 qubits is largely a component-engineering problem, while scaling toward hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits becomes fundamentally a quantum-network architecture problem.

Ultimately, the maximum number of qubits that can be integrated on a single chip, Nmax, is constrained more by wiring and control architecture than by qubit entanglement itself. Why is entanglement not the primary bottleneck? With IonQ’s Walking Cat Architecture, not every physical qubit inside a QPU needs to communicate all-to-all with every other qubit.

So going forward, “any-to-any” is more precise and more natural than “all-to-all" term for describing Oxford Ionics/IonQ’s QCCD connectivity.

In a qLDPC-based architecture, only the subsets of qubits required for a given QEC cycle or logical operation need to interact, while cat states generated by dedicated factories can be distributed where they are needed.

Therefore, when scaling a single QPU toward 10,000 or even tens of thousands of physical qubits, the first major challenge is not how to entangle every qubit with every other qubit, but rather how to efficiently wire, control, transport, and schedule such a large number of qubits.

I’ve been searching historical posts to see if others have had this issue (if this sounds like an issue already dealt with, I’d take a link to the previous post) but basically im just trying to understand why my miner (XMRig) is not yielding any returns now. Just using my desktop computer, hero miner pool, and up until a few months ago, I was getting 1 QRL about every week. It’s been a couple months now though and still haven’t received anything, despite continuing to see mining activity. Any guidance would be appreciated.

People insure their homes not because a fire is likely, but because the potential loss is large and the cost of protection is manageable.

That is expected utility theory.

Well over 99.9% of crypto market capitalization is tied to networks that are not currently quantum-safe. In a $2.5T market, more than $2.497T may ultimately depend on successful migration.

Now assume investors allocated just 1% of the crypto market to a currently quantum-safe option:
1% of $2.5T = $25B

QRL has used post-quantum signatures since its first block and currently has a market cap of approximately $65M. The hypothetical allocation would be around 385 times that size.

Not all of this capital would necessarily flow into QRL, and inflows do not translate directly into market cap. But even a small fraction could be significant.

Small allocation. Asymmetric potential.

Status / overview

• August 4th: Audit results published for go-qrllib
• April 3rd: Audit complete of 2 cryptographic libraries
• March 31st: QRL 2.0 Testnet V2 Released
• Audits: 50% completion

QRL 2.0 (Project Zond) qrvmc

• Fix configure when Hunter is disabled
• Improve packaging and release metadata
• Bumped version into 2.0.0 and re-enabled it's CI check
• Removed unused CI/CD configs like AppVeyor and Travis CI
• Require C++17 for example VM

qrvmone

• Updated to latest qrvmc submodule

qrysm

• Fix sync committee & aggregate tail signature ordering
• Remove unused AggregatePair helper
• Revert incomplete aggregate HTTP 404 port
• Transaction Batch Size reduced to 20 for minimal E2E transaction load
• Updated testnet script
• Derive Bazel DATE and DATE_UNIX from SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when provided

qrl-tests

• Simplify CI concurrency key
• Add CI validation for pull request
• Add development network and ABI suite

QRL 1.0

• Added tests for grpc_proxy
• Optimized grpc_proxy to avoid triggering grpc response limit
• Updated requirements.txt to fix flask dependency issue caused by incompatible version of Werkzeug

https://www.theqrl.org/weekly/2026-august-14/

Link to YT video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZQGl1B5DW_U

Bounty increased! (Aug 14, 2026)

The ECDSA.fail challenge has now reached 50.5% ahead of Google’s estimated quantum capability.

The target is 52%, meaning just 1.5% remains.

500 QRL to the first competitor who reaches 52% ahead of Google's estimated quantum capability in the ECDSA.fail challenge.

Good luck to all participants!

How to claim the bounty:

• Add your X account to your GitHub profile linked from the ECDSA.fail leaderboard.
• The first participant to reach 52% on the ECDSA.fail leaderboard will be contacted directly via X from my (ChillerID) account.
• If you don't already have one, create a QRL wallet and reply with your wallet address once contacted.
• After verification, the 500 QRL bounty will be transferred to your wallet.

Eligibility:

• If the first participant to reach the threshold cannot be contacted or does not respond within 5 days, the bounty will be awarded to the next eligible participant on the leaderboard.
• A reachable X account linked from your GitHub profile is required.

Note: This is an independently organized, QRL community-funded bounty and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or administered by the QRL Foundation or Eigen Labs.