Utocif

blockchain dev/cryptographer @spacecomputer, prev @vultisig / @thorchain

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[Charles Guillemet @P3b7_]

🚨 Google Quantum result was just rediscovered and IMPROVED!

On March 31, 2026, Google Quantum AI published a paper showing that 256-bit ECDLP, the hard problem behind ECDSA and therefore behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, TLS, and most of the world's authentication, can be solved with fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and ~90M Toffoli gates. Under 20 minutes on ~500,000 physical qubits.

BUT, they didn't publish the circuits. They published a zero-knowledge proof that the circuits hit those numbers. The standard read at the time: clever responsible disclosure, elegant.

Two months later, that read needs an update. Two things happened, in opposite directions.

1. The ZKP wasn't a stylistic choice. Google was stopped from publishing.

What was speculation in April is no longer. Google did not choose to keep the circuits private. The U.S. government prevented publication. The blog post phrased it politely ("we engaged with the U.S. government"). Call it what it is: diplomatic cover for a publication block.

This is the line Scott Aaronson warned about. At some point, the people estimating the resources needed to break deployed cryptosystems would stop publishing. We just watched it happen, and the actor enforcing the silence isn't Google's PR team. It's a government.

2. The ZKP turned out to be a reward function. AI used it.

Here's the part that's almost funny.

A ZK proof that "this hidden circuit achieves these resource counts" is, when you flip it, a public verifier of any candidate circuit. Submit a circuit, get back: does it compute ECC point addition correctly, and at what cost. Pass/fail plus a number. That is exactly the shape of a reinforcement-learning reward function.

The ZKP was designed to hide the attack. What it actually published is the reward function for rediscovering it.

The research community wired the verifier into an automated AI-driven search loop. They reproduced Google's numbers. Then they improved them by 11.5%. Two months, from outside Google, no access to the circuits, using the very artifact Google released to keep them proprietary.

Both of these are true at once. Hiding the circuits worked: nobody outside Google has Google's exact circuits. And hiding the circuits did not slow the frontier; it changed who is doing the search, and arguably accelerated it, because the verifier industrialized the search loop.

Let's NOT PANIC!
Neither of these is a working CRQC. There is still no quantum computer that can run this circuit. The headline state of the world has not changed.

What has changed is the honesty of every public PQC timeline. Cryptography exists to create mathematical trust in the security of systems. Trust isn't broken when an attack runs. It is eroded when the foundation looks thinner than the public record suggests, and the public record is now demonstrably thinner than reality in two ways: by classification on one end, by AI-driven re-derivation on the other.

In security, the moment you start doubting the foundation is the moment you start rebuilding it. Not the moment you panic. The moment you plan.

This isn't a moment to rush. It's a moment to commit to a migration plan and execute against it, knowing the threat model is shaped by what governments are willing to classify, not by what researchers are allowed to publish.

Stay safe. Stay honest about your trust assumptions.

[exponent 👽🦇🔊 @semicondurian]

Cysat Europe was a fantastically focused security conference for the @SpaceComputerIO team with @rezabfil, @am_ylm and @utocif

Meeting cybersecurity-focused space companies.
Everyone building in this space understands the importance of being prepared for several key pillars:

- Post Quantum Cryptography migration: This is no longer an option, by 2030 or earlier there has to be a fail safe migration plan.
- Space compute tech inherently hits sensitive national security matters, it's imperative for nation states to either develop independent solution stack or use sovereign technology with 3rd parties
- Standards are only starting to emerge, we're starting to see healthy competition between ressembling bespoke solutions.

My main takeaway is that besides imaging and comms, space is undeniably becoming a critical compute frontier humanity will be focused on in the next decades.

I can't wait till our first satellite launch later this year!

ITS TIME TO BUILD SPACE COMPUTERS

[Pedro @zkpedrongmi]

Starting now at @SatNewsEvents SmallSat conference

@SpaceComputerIO co-founder @rezabfil briefing on Post-Quantum Computing for the space industry 🚀

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Dr Balakrishnan casually explaining how he built his own AI agent (a 2nd brain for diplomacy) using Claude & WhatsApp integration etc. on a Raspberry Pi

“You cannot govern a technology you have only been briefed on.” 🇸🇬

[SpaceComputer @SpaceComputerIO]

We just published Space Fabric.

It's our secure compute verification architecture for satellites in low earth orbit, and it's the first infrastructure of its kind.

Let’s see if you can explain it 👇

[frezabek @rezabfil]

https://t.co/2axoGUKNgy

[exponent 👽🦇🔊 @semicondurian]

@SpaceComputerIO is building the Space Internet with in-orbit secure compute hardware and software

Introducing Space Fabric secure hardware + software architecture for software isolation dual secure elements integrated onto PCBs.

We’ve October ride to space.

@SpaceNews_Inc @spacereportr

1/

[frezabek @rezabfil]

1/ “Just put it in a TEE” sounds convincing, until you ask: where is this actually running?

TEE attestations can prove what code is running and on which CPU.

They don’t prove where that machine is running.

That missing piece is the physical-access gap. 🧵

[SpaceNews @SpaceNews_Inc]

SpaceComputer to conduct on-orbit test of secure computing infrastructure https://t.co/MrWQuBbrpO

[SpaceComputer @SpaceComputerIO]

Come work with the SpaceComputer team this summer!

We're looking for 1-2 university students starting in June 2026

To help build Orbitport, our dev-friendly satellite-to-ground station comms API gateway

Deadline to apply: May 7, 2026
How to apply: Check application details👇

[Utocif @utocif]

Your cryptography can now pull entropy from space! 🛰️

Try it easily: if your Rust code expects an RNG implementing RngCore + CryptoRng, crypto-ctrng can plug in as an additional source of space-based entropy without changing the interface.

[SpaceComputer @SpaceComputerIO]

We're excited to announce we've open-sourced crypto-ctrng 🥳

It's a Rust lib that plugs cosmic entropy into anything expecting RngCore or CryptoRng

No API key required.

Inside:
> XOR w/ OS randomness default
> ChaCha20 DRBG with auto-reseed
> Multi-gateway IPFS fallback
> TestU01 and PractRand in test suite

Use it for ECDSA nonces & threshold signatures

Watch @utocif, applied cryptographer at SpaceComputer break it down at @EthCC

[Lukasz Olejnik @lukOlejnik]

Physicist has written a fascinating big beautiful paper.Let’s not be afraid to call it what it is - groundbreaking. For hundreds of years, mathematics had dozens of “basic” functions: sine, cosine, logarithm, square root, exponential. You know these from school. Everyone does. Now it turns out that all of it is one single operator:
E(x, y) = exp(x) - ln(y), and the constant 1.
Sin, cos, π - everything follows from this neatly , just nest it properly. Nature hid the simplest possible description of reality. And it was just been found. The whole thing is beautiful and remarkable, here the word “groundbreaking” is not a marketing buzzword.
For instance, instead of writing π or 3.14, one can now elegantly write E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(E(E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,1),1)),E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(1,1)),1))),1)),1)),1)),1))),1)),E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(1,1))),1))),1)),1)),1)),1),1),1))),1))),1)),E(E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(E(1,E(1,E(E(1,1),1))),1)),E(1,1))),1))),1)),1)),1)),1)

https://t.co/Pv2UUbTEay

[Mikerah @badcryptobitch]

https://t.co/zxmrxZ9ZGY

[SpaceComputer @SpaceComputerIO]

We are excited to announce we are joining the Nvidia Inception Program!

As we scale our compute and security capabilities in orbit, the #NVIDIAInception program will help to accelerate development of our infrastructure.

Ad astra! 🚀

[SpaceComputer @SpaceComputerIO]

Google just put a 2029 deadline on post-quantum cryptography. Their latest research suggests ECC could fall with 20× fewer qubits than last year’s estimates.

That has immediate implications for every satellite.
14,904 satellites in LEO.
<5% of enterprises have any form of quantum-safe encryption in place.

This means most satellites security has an expiration date.

PQC is in SpaceComputer's roadmap as a design requirement, aligned with the industry's 2029 timeline.

We are building with security as priority from day one, because you can't swap out security after launch. 🚀

[Pedro @zkpedrongmi]

And it’s truly fascinating how much there is to explore in orbit

Our satellites will be the most physically inaccessible, cryptographically hardened devices orbiting the earth 🌍

Hardware reveal soon™️

[Pedro @zkpedrongmi]

re: geopolitics a satellite just told us 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘴𝘰 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳.

no cap this is real randomness from orbit 🛰️ https://t.co/ymieqBMCAs

@SpaceComputerIO

[Lukas ⟠🔺 @FryCookVC]

It is crazy how fast an ecosystem can move. Just eight months ago I feel like the Space Industry headlines were still dominated by two-three major companies. When Daniel mentioned @SpaceComputerIO we got incredibly excited and had to get onboard.

Today, a few months later my timeline is teeming with startups raising for the future in space. It's incredibly exciting. And now with Artemis II even more people will enter this space. How could you not be excited!?

And the SpaceComputer team keeps on cooking. Incredibly cracked devs working on building the core infrastructure to become the orbital confidential compute platform. Security is hard from a software and tech perspective. But the team at SpaceComputer keeps pushing the boundaries 🔥

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today is a monumentous day for quantum computing and cryptography. Two breakthrough papers just landed (links in next tweet). Both papers improve Shor's algorithm, infamous for cracking RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. The two results compound, optimising separate layers of the quantum stack. The results are shocking. I expect a narrative shift and a further R&D boost toward post-quantum cryptography.

The first paper is by Google Quantum AI. They tackle the (logical) Shor algorithm, tailoring it to crack Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. The algorithm runs on ~1K logical qubits for the 256-bit elliptic curve secp256k1. Due to the low circuit depth, a fast superconducting computer would recover private keys in minutes. I'm grateful to have joined as a late paper co-author, in large part for the chance to interact with experts and the alpha gleaned from internal discussions.

The second paper is by a stealthy startup called Oratomic, with ex-Google and prominent Caltech faculty. Their starting point is Google's improvements to the logical quantum circuit. They then apply improvements at the physical layer, with tricks specific to neutral atom quantum computers. The result estimates that 26,000 atomic qubits are sufficient to break 256-bit elliptic curve signatures. This would be roughly a 40x improvement in physical qubit count over previous state-of-the-art. On the flip side, a single Shor run would take ~10 days due to the relatively slow speed of neutral atoms.

Below are my key takeaways. As a disclaimer, I am not a quantum expert. Time is needed for the results to be properly vetted. Based on my interactions with the team, I have faith the Google Quantum AI results are conservative. The Oratomic paper is much harder for me to assess, especially because of the use of more exotic qLDPC codes. I will take it with a grain of salt until the dust settles.

→ q-day: My confidence in q-day by 2032 has shot up significantly. IMO there's at least a 10% chance that by 2032 a quantum computer recovers a secp256k1 ECDSA private key from an exposed public key. While a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) before 2030 still feels unlikely, now is undoubtedly the time to start preparing.
→ censorship: The Google paper uses a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof to demonstrate the algorithm's existence without leaking actual optimisations. From now on, assume state-of-the-art algorithms will be censored. There may be self-censorship for moral or commercial reasons, or because of government pressure. A blackout in academic publications would be a tell-tale sign.
→ cracking time: A superconducting quantum computer, the type Google is building, could crack keys in minutes. This is because the optimised quantum circuit is just 100M Toffoli gates, which is surprisingly shallow. (Toffoli gates are hard because they require production of so-called "magic states".) Toffoli gates would consume ~10 microseconds on a superconducting platform, totalling ~1,000 sec of Shor runtime.
→ latency optimisations: Two latency optimisations bring key cracking time to single-digit minutes. The first parallelises computation across quantum devices. The second involves feeding the pubkey to the quantum computer mid-flight, after a generic setup phase.
→ fast- and slow-clock: At first approximation there are two families of quantum computers. The fast-clock flavour, which includes superconducting and photonic architectures, runs at roughly 100 kHz. The slow-clock flavour, which includes trapped ion and neutral atom architectures, runs roughly 1,000x slower (~100 Hz, or ~1 week to crack a single key).
→ qubit count: The size-optimised variant of the algorithm runs on 1,200 logical qubits. On a superconducting computer with surface code error correction that's roughly 500K physical qubits, a 400:1 physical-to-logical ratio. The surface code is conservative, assuming only four-way nearest-neighbour grid connectivity. It was demonstrated last year by Google on a real quantum computer.
→ future gains: Low-hanging fruit is still being picked, with at least one of the Google optimisations resulting from a surprisingly simple observation. Interestingly, AI was not (yet!) tasked to find optimisations. This was also the first time authors such as Craig Gidney attacked elliptic curves (as opposed to RSA). Shor logical qubit count could plausibly go under 1K soonish.
→ error correction: The physical-to-logical ratio for superconducting computers could go under 100:1. For superconducting computers that would be mean ~100K physical qubits for a CRQC, two orders of magnitude away from state of the art. Neutral atoms quantum computers are amenable to error correcting codes other than the surface code. While much slower to run, they can bring down the physical to logical qubit ratio closer to 10:1.
→ Bitcoin PoW: Commercially-viable Bitcoin PoW via Grover's algorithm is not happening any time soon. We're talking decades, possibly centuries away. This observation should help focus the discussion on ECDSA and Schnorr. (Side note: as unofficial Bitcoin security researcher, I still believe Bitcoin PoW is cooked due to the dwindling security budget.)
→ team quality: The folks at Google Quantum AI are the real deal. Craig Gidney (@CraigGidney) is arguably the world's top quantum circuit optimisooor. Just last year he squeezed 10x out of Shor for RSA, bringing the physical qubit count down from 10M to 1M. Special thanks to the Google team for patiently answering all my newb questions with detailed, fact-based answers. I was expecting some hype, but found none.