Study: Estimated cost of quantum attacks on BTC and ETH drops by over 50%

According to a new paper published by researchers from Theta Labs, the Ethereum Foundation, StarkWare, and other institutions, the resources required for key computational steps in potential quantum attacks on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are over 50% lower than the estimates previously released by Google’s Quantum AI team. The study’s proposed quantum circuit design needs only around 1,151 logical qubits, and uses approximately 1.3 million Toffoli gate operations to complete the relevant calculations, with a composite score of roughly 1.5 billion—below Google’s previously announced level of around 3 billion. The research primarily optimized the point addition calculation step in Shor’s algorithm, which theoretically allows a sufficiently powerful quantum computer to derive private keys from public keys. Jieyi Long, one of the paper’s lead authors and CTO of Theta Labs, noted that quantum attacks are not currently imminent, but quantum-resistant migration will take many years and cannot be remedied after an attack occurs.