IonQ's CEO Shares How Long It Will Take Quantum Computers To Hack Bitcoin's Encryption. And Argues It Will Happen Sooner Than Expected

IonQ's CEO just put a specific year on Q-Day, the moment quantum computers could shatter the encryption protecting Bitcoin wallets, and the timeline is far closer than most investors realize. The twist: he's also selling the only product he claims…

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Speaking on CNBC Wednesday morning, IonQ (NYSE:IONQ | IONQ Price Prediction) Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi put a countdown clock on the cryptography underpinning the world’s largest digital asset. He said IonQ has published a paper laying out how a 2,000-qubit machine could run an elliptic-curve encryption attack in under 26 days, and he reiterated 2028 as his expectation for “Q-Day,” the point at which quantum machines threaten today’s public-key standards. He was careful to add the capability “is not here yet.”

Why the Timeline Just Got Shorter

De Masi has been telegraphing this compression for months. On IonQ’s Q2 2026 call, he told investors: “As I foretold a year ago, the timeline for cryptographically relevant machines that threaten RSA encryption is rapidly compressing. Over the past 15 years, the estimated number of qubits needed to break encryption has dropped by four orders of magnitude.” He added: “A year ago, people thought that Q-Day was something happening in the 2030s. They now understand it’s something happening in the 2020s.”