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Comment by jennifer-trin

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Comment by jennifer-trin

This week's focus: distinguishing quantum hype from real progress, and evaluating where cryptography actually lives in real systems.

I use the following examples to help read quantum progress critically.

Sam Jaques' updated Landscape in Quantum Computing shows that quantum computing hardware has greatly improved over the past five years, with 400% increases in qubit count and decreases in error rates. Growth isn't uniform, though, so we can't assume the same trajectory for the next five.

The same critical lens applies to quarterly reports. I compared IBM Quantum's Q1 2026 and Q4 2025 figures and explained EPLG and CLOPS, which are useful industry-standard benchmarks. Use tools such as Quantum Benchmark Zoo to get a full context on industry benchmarks.

Coinbase released a position paper on post-quantum migration strategies, highlighting many of the quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography concepts that I've highlighted in past roundups.

A few new concepts include:

- They highlight strategies and security for Post-Quantum Signing. I explain one of the strategies - the "2-out-of-2" approach, which combines a PQ signature with a standard ECDSA/EdDSA signature. - Finally, a metric on the "cost" of post-quantum migration. Replacing ECDSA with ML-DSA could grow Bitcoin block sizes by about 38x, pushing signature data past 1 TB per year.

JP Aumasson's presentation does something I rarely see. It groups cryptography by where it appears in real software systems and points to tools for detecting it.

I tested one of those tools, CBOMKit by IBM, on the Apache Airflow GitHub repo.

The result showed 19.2% of cryptographic algorithms used are not quantum-safe, spanning 12 cryptographic assets across 7 primitives and 3 functions. These cryptographic assets authenticate workloads and control execution, which adds migration complexity. If I were an Apache Airflow user, I would ask the Apache Foundation about its PQC migration strategy.

Other notable items: → Firedancer and Anza prototyped FALCON signature verification on Solana validator clients, prioritizing verification speed over signature size. Anza explicitly states this isn't a commitment to FALCON, which raises the question of what the alternative is in their pipeline. → The blockchain industry suffered a plethora of non-quantum-related vulnerabilities. How can we prepare for the post-quantum world when digital security is so fragile in our current world?

Replies jennifer-trin · 2026-04-30
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