Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner . The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And c heck out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.
Eight days ago an Ethereum researcher told large holders to move their coins. Today Google published a result that makes him look less paranoid and more early.
Google Quantum AI cut a critical class of quantum errors roughly 40-fold on its Willow chip, per a new paper in Science . The technique attacks what may be quantum computing’s single biggest tax - producing the clean, single-use resources certain operations need, which by some estimates eats up to 95% of a machine’s capacity. Instead of building dedicated qubit factories to purify them, Google filters: inject a rough state, run it through a gauntlet of checks, throw out the 92% that fail. What survives hits 99.99% fidelity.
Nobody is draining wallets with this. Breaking an RSA-2048 key needs errors around one in 10 billion - about a million times cleaner than what Google just showed.
But researchers are moving closely. In 2019, cracking RSA-2048 was estimated to need 20 million noisy qubits. By 2025 that was under one million. A March 2026 Google whitepaper put Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography at under 500,000 physical qubits. Willow has 105.
The irony this week is that Justin Drake’s actual fear wasn’t quantum at all. He thinks AI-driven mathematics breaks elliptic curves first, on ordinary hardware, in “months not years.” His advice: big holders should move funds to fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction, because signing exposes your public key. So crypto is being “attacked” on two fronts: quantum advancement and AI advancement.
With that said, key players are making moves and starting serious preparations. Coinbase spent this week arguing the migration has to start now. Sui is already running quantum-safe transactions on a test network. Ethereum, Zcash and Near all have plans to be quantum-resistant.
Crypto leaders will be prepared. But this was a reminder from Google that the tock is indeed ticking…
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