Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest CDN and internet edge networks, has substantially accelerated its deadline to migrate to post-quantum cryptography amid fears that hardware breakthroughs could render current encryption obsolete within three years.
The quantum-vulnerable Bitcoin community rang alarm bells after the giant move.
Cloudflare announced its new post-quantum deadline, joining Google in an aggressive security sprint targeting 2029.
Two-thirds of human traffic to Cloudflare already uses post-quantum encryption, but the company wants that at 100% within three years.
Google set the same 2029 deadline two weeks ago, flagging concerning breakthroughs in quantum hardware, error correction, and factoring. The search engine giant has also already deployed post-quantum protections across Chrome, Android 17, and Google Cloud, and is forcing other engineering teams to follow suit.
By 2029, IBM plans to deliver its first fault-tolerant quantum machine, Starling.
The quantum breakthroughs just keep coming
The announcements continue a blistering pace of quantum breakthroughs over the last few weeks.
On March 30, Google Quantum AI released a whitepaper showing that fewer than 1,200 logical qubits could theoretically solve Bitcoin’s 256-bit Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem.
On superconducting hardware, that meant fewer than 500,000 physical qubits by its estimate. That’s roughly a 20-fold reduction from the prior benchmark of approximately 9 million set in 2023.
The same day, Oratomic, a quantum startup founded by Caltech and Harvard faculty, theorized that Shor’s algorithm could run at cryptographically relevant scales with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits, a step-change improvement in solving 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithms.
On April 5, IQM Quantum Computers and Germany’s Fraunhofer FOKUS compiled Shor’s algorithm, gate by gate, at RSA-2048 scale — a first by quantum researchers.
Prior estimates for cracking RSA-2048 relied on symbolic extrapolation and theoretical modeling, whereas this research team produced a gate-by-gate assembly with an exact qubit budget.
Read more: Google’s quantum computer could break Bitcoin in two ways
Bitcoin has a big quantum problem
There are well over $100 billion in quantum-vulnerable bitcoin (BTC), including legacy wallets such as Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings.
Chaincode Labs, Bitcoin’s hub for technical development, estimated a comprehensive post-quantum migration could take seven years.
Taproot, Bitcoin’s prior upgrade, took four years from proposal to activation, while SegWit required two.
Approximately 1.7 million BTC have permanently exposed public keys. Chaincode puts the broader vulnerability to a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer at 20-50% of BTC, worth as much as $680 billion.
Justin Drake, a pro-Ethereum researcher who co-authored Google’s whitepaper, believes there’s at least a 10% chance a quantum computer recovers a Bitcoin private key by brute force from an exposed public key by 2032.
Bitcoin has a market capitalization of $1.36 trillion with a software upgrade process measured in years. Cryptographically-relevant quantum computers also have a deadline measured in years and could have as few as three left, according to Cloudflare, Google, and IBM.
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