IonQ Estimates 20,000-Qubit Machine Could Break Bitcoin’s secp256k1 in 26 Days

Insider Brief

• IonQ published an end-to-end resource estimate showing that a fault-tolerant trapped-ion quantum computer with about 20,000 physical qubits could solve the secp256k1 elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem in 25.7 days per attempt.
• The study estimates a device footprint of 19,397 physical qubits, 1,457 logical qubits and 39 million logical Toffoli gates, with the computation mapped through the underlying quantum error-correction circuits.
• The result highlights potential risks to elliptic-curve signatures used in digital assets and other authentication systems while showing that ML-DSA and SLH-DSA are unaffected by this class of attack.

PRESS RELEASE — IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), the world’s leading full-stack quantum platform and foundry, today published the first complete, end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for running Shor’s algorithm. The historic paper by IonQ’s research team uses the recently published Walking Cat architecture to demonstrate how a specific application can be optimized for a trapped-ion quantum computer. This work concludes that a 20,000-physical-qubit IonQ quantum computer is expected to break secp256k1, the 256-bit elliptic curve used by blockchain technology such as Bitcoin, in just under 26 days. IonQ chose to run Shor’s algorithm for secp256k1 because it is one of the most scrutinized cryptography standards in production today.