Weekly Roundup 04/03/26 (Two big quantum papers, Drift protocol hack, Maritime Salvage law) (EP.711)
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Quantum computing is reaching a critical threshold for Bitcoin's security - new research from Google and Caltech has drastically lowered the estimated resource requirements and runtime needed to crack elliptic curve cryptography.
“Their big contribution was realizing if you had a quantum computer this size, you could actually crack elliptic curves in around 10 minutes, which is how long it takes for a transaction to be included in the blockchain.”
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The Bitcoin developer community lacks a clear quantum mitigation strategy - despite the emergence of specific resource estimates for attacks, there is currently no public roadmap or consensus on the Bitcoin mailing list for a post-quantum upgrade.
“If you look at the Bitcoin mailing list, there's no real evidence that there's any kind of posture that Bitcoin is going to upgrade. We have to somehow eavesdrop on their private conversations to get this information, which is not very helpful.”
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Stablecoins are rapidly displacing traditional banks in the wholesale FX market - the absence of major financial institutions in on-chain liquidity is allowing startups like OpenFX to scale to massive volumes and attract significant venture funding.
“The FX market is just being completely upended by stablecoins right now. And the big wholesale banks are nowhere. So you're seeing these companies like OpenFX just get to tremendous scale.”