Guest Post: Why Financial Infrastructure Needs Post-Quantum Security

Guest Post By Ryan Kirkley, Founder & CEO, Global Settlement Holdings.

A temporal asymmetry lies at the heart of financial infrastructure. Settlement systems and payment rails are built to run for thirty to fifty years, and most of what moves the dollar today was last built forty years ago. Fedwire settled an average of $4.6 trillion a day in 2025, CHIPS another $2 trillion, and a stablecoin market that did not exist fifteen years ago now holds more than $300 billion of dollar liabilities on public blockchains. All of it authenticates itself with two families of mathematics, RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, and quantum computers able to run Shor’s algorithm against production key sizes now sit within a decade. Any infrastructure deployed today on classical-only cryptography is born obsolete.

Harvest-now, decrypt-later campaigns, in which adversaries record encrypted traffic today to decrypt once the hardware arrives, are passive, undetectable and, per NIST and CISA guidance, already underway. Sovereign positions and central bank flows carry decades-long confidentiality requirements. The breach has arguably already occurred, but we just can’t read the ransom note.

The standard reassurance is that fault-tolerant quantum computing remains a distant fantasy. The last year has killed it; accelerated by artificial intelligence. In late 2024, Google’s Willow processor demonstrated below-threshold error correction, logical error rates that fall exponentially as code distance grows (Google Quantum AI, Nature 638). AlphaQubit, Google DeepMind’s AI decoder, then beat the best human-designed decoders by roughly 30%. Better decoders lower qubit overhead, and lower overhead pulls hardware targets years closer: the AlphaFold dynamic, aimed at the one technology that breaks public-key cryptography.