The encrypted connection your bank uses to settle an interbank payment, the diplomatic cable a foreign ministry transmitted two years ago, the medical records sitting in your insurer's database. All of them rely on cryptographic problems that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is designed to solve.
We don't have that quantum computer yet. We're closer than we were last year. And the most defensible threat model assumes adversaries are already collecting the encrypted material now, betting on a decryption capability arriving inside the next decade or two.
This is an attempt to lay out where the quantum-computing field actually is in 2026, who's exposed (almost everyone), who has already started migrating, and what realistic timelines look like.
Google, Willow. Announced December 2024, a 105-qubit superconducting chip that demonstrated below-threshold quantum error correction for the first time. This is arguably the most significant milestone of 2024 — error correction is the long-standing barrier between today's noisy processors and the fault-tolerant machines that would actually be useful.
IBM, Heron R2. A 156-qubit superconducting processor. IBM has published a roadmap targeting 200,000+ physical qubits and 2,000+ logical qubits by 2033.
USTC, Zuchongzhi-3. A 105-qubit processor that demonstrated quantum advantage on Random Circuit Sampling at roughly 10^15 times the speed of the best classical supercomputer on the same workload.
Conservative estimates put the threshold for breaking RSA-2048 at around 4,000 logical qubits or roughly 20 million physical qubits with current error rates. The trajectory of the past five years suggests that gap closes well within the working lifetime of cryptographic infrastructure being deployed right now.
The public-key cryptography that quantum computers threaten is not some niche component. Every HTTPS connection. SWIFT. Card payments. Fedwire. Government communications. Healthcare records. Software supply chain. The energy grid. None of this is hypothetical — it's the cryptographic substrate of every operational modern economy.
The most defensible quantum-threat argument doesn't depend on when the relevant hardware arrives. Encrypted material captured today, decrypted in 2040, is still material your adversary now has. Intelligence material has indefinite sensitivity. Corporate IP retains commercial value over decades. Cryptographic key material — if you can derive a master key from a decade-old TLS handshake, you can backdate-forge signatures.
On August 13, 2024, NIST published the first finalized post-quantum cryptography standards: FIPS 203 (ML-KEM for key exchange) and FIPS 204 (ML-DSA for digital signatures). This is the standard Valdium uses — ML-DSA-65, also called Dilithium3 — for every transaction signature, from block zero.
The NSA has mandated that national security systems transition to post-quantum algorithms by 2035. The BIS raised the harvest-now-decrypt-later risk in Project Leap, their study with European central banks on quantum-safe payments.
Valdium's position is simple: the window to build quantum-safe infrastructure without emergency retrofit is closing. We'd rather ship it now than explain later why we didn't. — dev team
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