Are you fit to lead your bank if you don’t understand tech?

I would love to walk into a bank’s boardroom with my opening slide explaining:

“Step confidently into the future of Web3 with Zond, a quantum-resistant Layer-1 blockchain* engineered to transcend today’s security limitations and safeguard your dApps, from DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces, while powering the next generation of smart contracts in tomorrow’s digital economy.”

This is the opening line from a company called QRL, who I have known for a decade. QRL stands for Quantum Resistant Ledger, and aims to protect blockchains built today from quantum attacks tomorrow.

Add ZKP, DLT, AGI, ML and a few more terms and yes, you would be seeing the exit within seconds. But then most of you know that I’m not a fan of TLAs.

Why do I raise this today? Well, years ago, we hosted a few events around this space, including this one with Maury Shenk https://fsclub.zyen.com/events/forthcoming-events/quantum-resistant-encryption/

I’ve also blogged about this existential threat to bitcoin for years

How quantum will change everything (including banking, money and security, March 2018

And then Google stumbles across it and grabs all the headlines!

Google Warns Quantum Computers Could Crack Bitcoin-Like Encryption 20 Times Faster Than Expected

So, what is the problem?

Well, at the heart of the way bitcoin works is the immutable ledger. A transaction recording system that cannot be breached. The thing is that most experts believe that, using quantum computing, it can be breached.

In a 20-page research paper, Google Quantum AI researcher Craig Gidney writes: “2048-bit RSA encryption could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week”.

This is concerning as the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm, which secures transactions on bitcoin with public and private keys, is similar to the RSA.

Now, I’m already wondering what the hell I am writing about? Quantum? RSA? Elliptic Curves? dAPPs? DeFi? Layer-1? Imagine walking into a boardroom discussing all of that stuff!

Anyways, in my usual quest to understand and internalise all this jargon, let’s walk through it.

First and foremost is understanding Quantum computing and qubits. This breakthrough technology will dominate the 2030s, and is developing fast amongst the big tech players from IBM to Google. The aim is to create a system that can process a thousand more instructions at a thousandth of the cost. You can find out all you need to know about quantum here: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/quantum-computing

The reason why this is concerning is that blockchain ledgers are built on systems similar to RSA encryption called the Elliptic Curve algorithm. It is core to cryptography and Gidney’s paper makes clear that this area of cryptography could be broken by quantum qubits far faster than ever thought before:

In 2019, “I co-published an estimate stating that 2048 bit RSA integers could be factored in eight hours by a quantum computer with 20 million noisy qubits. In this paper, I substantially reduce the number of qubits required. I estimate that a 2048 bit RSA integer could be factored in less than a week by a quantum computer with less than a million noisy qubits”.

You can access Gidney’s paper for free here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917

Meantime, rather than writing in depth details about all these other tech bits and bytes, you can find out for yourselves. Leaving you to do that then begs the question: so, what’s the point of this blog, Chris?

The point of this blog is that blockchain technology is seen as revolutionary. It is an immutable ledger for transactions for anything from smart contracts to clearing and settlement. Banks and many other institutions have focused on how to use this technology for over a decade and, in many areas, it is moving to mainstream.

If, in a decade from now, all of those developments are worthless and the value of all cryptocurrency markets implode due to quantum attacks, there is a huge risk here.

This is why, for over a decade, firms like the Quantum Resistant Ledger spotted the risks and have been developing solutions.

A storm is gathering on the horizon: quantum computing. While this revolutionary technology promises incredible advancements, it also spells doom for today’s cryptographic standards underpinning most blockchains. Quantum computers, wielding tools like Shor’s Algorithm, will shatter these defences, leaving digital assets and entire ecosystems vulnerable.

The fact is, many organizations have already taken this leap, while blockchain struggles to recognize it: Apple has secured iMessage, Cloudflare is securing HTTPS, and the US Federal Government has mandated all departments and contractors migrate to quantum-safe encryption …

You can read more here: https://www.theqrl.org/zond/

Now, just to be clear, I am not endorsing Zond or QRL, but there is an urgency to future-proof your blockchain, DLT and crypto developments as quantum will be here within a decade and, if you are missing these threats to your internal structures, then you might as well recognise that you are throwing money down the drain … literally.

Meanwhile, no. I do not walk into boardrooms with the question: what do you know about Layer-1, dApps and Quantum. I purely ask them to explain the difference between blockchain and DLT. You may say that’s not fair but I respond: well, if the future of our industry is predicated on bulletproof digital foundations that use immutable ledgers, do you feel you are capable to lead your organisation to those future challenges when you clearly do not understand them?

 

* Feeling sorry for my readers who are not into all this stuff, the one key term used in the opening is Layer-1 blockchain. Layer-1 (L1) refers to the core, foundational blockchain network itself, while Layer-2 (L2) refers to protocols built on top of L1 to enhance its functionality, especially scalability. Think of L1 as the main road, and L2 as express lanes built on top to improve traffic flow. Meantime, I explained dApps years ago.