Crypto's Quantum Defense Is Being Built in the Open

Everyone and anyone seems up in arms about the (not new) threat of AI and/or quantum computing breaking cryptography.

Following Justin Drake's viral post, "bunker mode" is practically a household phrase, despite being only a week old, and every token touting quantum preparedness has seen double-digit gains.

While it's paramount that we address these issues and face them head-on, much of the discussion fails to identify initiatives already working to apply AI as a defense against these very threats, initiatives like those spearheaded by Eigen Labs' Yukon.

I've written about Yukon, or what would become Yukon, before: the open-research challenges Eigen Labs has been running since this summer.

These follow a structure where a technical problem is opened to the public, and participants work to "solve" it using a mixture of their developer knowledge and agentic assistance. Each proposed solution is automatically tested, with successful improvements becoming the starting point for the next attempt, spurring a constant flywheel of iteration.

The first of these challenges grew directly out of the original quantum scare. In March, Google's quantum research first spooked everyone by suggesting that breaking Bitcoin and Ethereum's cryptography could require substantially less quantum computing power than previously thought. It published its resource estimates and a way to verify them, but withheld the optimized circuits themselves.