Guest Post: How Tokenized Finance Can Prepare for Post-Quantum Security

Guest Post by Edwin Mata, Co-Founder and CEO of Brickken

Building financial infrastructure is strange: you have to make decisions today for assets that may still exist long after the underlying technology has changed. That is especially true in tokenization because a bond issued on-chain today might mature in twenty years. An interest in a private company could sit on a cap table for decades. Real estate, private credit, funds and other assets being brought on-chain involve legal rights and economic relationships that can persist for a very long time.

So when we talk about quantum computing and finance, I think the useful question is not when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will arrive. I do not know, and I am skeptical of anyone who gives you a precise date. The alternative question is much more practical: are we building tokenized financial infrastructure that can evolve when the cryptography securing it needs to evolve?

I think we can, but only if we build adaptability into the architecture now. An asset may need to outlive the technology supporting it.

We have already seen this problem, on a smaller scale, throughout the history of technology: protocols change, security assumptions evolve and networks are upgraded. Software that looked perfectly adequate ten years ago becomes obsolete.