Quantum Advantage Begins to Flower, May 2025

GM frens, this is the Quantum Doom Clock with Colton Dillion and Rick Carback, the founders of Quip Network, onramping the world to quantum computing subnets protected by post-quantum cryptography on every chain. As April's quantum showers give way to May's blooming quantum advantage, we put together this site and newsletter because the clock is ticking toward the day when your assets can be stolen by hackers with sufficiently powerful quantum computers. Check out CoinDesk’s coverage of the team’s view on the quantum threat.

Quantum Advantage Emerges: Real-World Applications

The belle of the ball this month has been D-Wave’s quantum supremacy announcement from March being backed up with a paper published in Science with Oak Ridge National Labs on April 30th. While claims of “quantum supremacy” have a murky history, this one looks legitimate with convincing evidence that their quantum computer performs magnetic materials simulation faster than regular computers. This result is further backed up by another paper published in physical review letters with similar results for spin-glass problems from researchers at USC. They even have the academics admitting to the slightly less aggressive term of “quantum advantage” in the coverage and the editors note at the top of the article!

In other words, the promise of quantum advantage is starting to show concrete signs, with quantum computers beginning to outperform classical machines in specific, complex tasks. Other example applications include:

The development of decoded quantum interferometry (DQI), which cannot run on current QPUs but has application to a broader class of optimization problems which has researchers excited about the future.
A drug discovery project by IBM, Insilico Medicine, and QuEra using quantum computers combined with AI. The idea is to identify potential cancer drugs and accelerate the search for treatments for conditions like myotonic dystrophy. The work is proving feasibility even if it is far from quantum supremacy.
Rigetti demonstrated the potential for power grid optimizations. Their quantum preconditioning technique enabled the solver to achieve 99.95% accuracy in four times fewer iterations than the original problem. This speed, even with imperfect fidelities, might offer an advantage for real-world scenarios where time is often a critical constraint, even if classical methods reach higher accuracy with more iterations.

The meta in quantum is definitely shifting its focus from theoretical "exhibition" problems to practical, real-world applications. Reflecting this trend, the U.S. House has dipped into the action with the bipartisan Quantum Sandbox for Near-Term Applications Act to accelerate quantum technology deployment through public-private cloud-based testbeds. Similarly, DARPA jumped in with its own program to scale quantum computers. These developments are a nice change from recent months when it was China’s investments dominating the news.

A Dose of Humility: Keeping it Real

While all this progress is undeniable, we encourage readers to keep a skeptical eye when you see news in this space. The most promising QPUs will not be sitting on your desktop but in a datacenter built for a supercomputer. The competition is definitely with the supercomputer market, and the fact that Google's 53-qubit computer can be simulated with 1,432 GPUs reminds us that classical computing is still a formidable competitor and hybrid approaches are crucial for the foreseeable future.

The news around D-Wave was not all absolute progress. Their team published a blockchain “Proof of Quantum Work” with interesting ideas, but which would require all participants to operate a quantum computer. That kind of requirement defeats the idea of “hard to find, cheap to verify” type of problem you need for that kind of proof system to have a secure blockchain. Our fearless leader Rick pointed this out among other problems with their claims.

More generally, all this talk of “Quantum Supremacy” is getting tired. The debate is moving beyond simple qubit counts to focus on “return on investment" and concrete business value. We feel the same about it. More practical and less hype-driven approaches to evaluating quantum technology need to be the norm moving forward.

Just take a look at this result from University College London which claims to create scalable manufacturing processes for neutral atom architectures, but they’re individually placing atoms in a grid by hand at nanoscopic scale! Doesn’t sound that scalable to us.

Quantum Computing Quick Hits: The Field Blossoms

Nonetheless, qubit counts continue to increase, so much so that New Scientist proposes that we double our entangled qubits every year:

Fujitsu Installed 256-Qubit Computer at RIKEN
IQM deployed a 5-qubit system in Poland and committed to delivering world-leading 150-qubit and 300-qubit systems to Finland by 2026 and 2027
Rigetti came back to life with a 36-qubit computer, and announced a partnership with Norma to deliver an 84-qubit cloud service
QuantWare creates a 3D chip architecture allowing better connectivity between qubits, supporting 100 to 200 qubits depending on platform architecture
A group of researchers published in Nature on their photonic qudit results, increasing the representable states up from the 2D qubit up to 3D qutrits and 4D ququarts
Researchers at university of Bristol show that qubit counts can be traded off for computational speed
Quantinuum claims to 10x their quantum volume over the last year, a measure of the useful computation that can be done with their qubits
China’s Origin quantum computers demonstrate qubit counts of over 500.

And quantum computers continue to get more accessible:

Google Cloud makes Pasqal neutral atom processors available to the public
Equal1 releases a rack-mounted quantum computer for deployment in high-performance computing environments and data centers
Nvidia opened up a global research center for quantum computing and hybrid applications, dedicating a supercomputer powered by H100s to validating results
MIT published a new method for quantum communication between photonic quantum computers over a short superconducting waveguide
Scientist sent a quantum state over 158 miles of fiber optic cable in existing infrastructure, paving the way to quantum data centers

This is really bad news for systems that are still vulnerable to quantum attacks, but fortunately defensive development has also seen some progress.

Quantum Security Updates: Addressing the Threat

The quantum threat to current cryptography remains a serious concern, and this month saw continued action preparing for a post-quantum world. You know it’s serious because Blackrock updated their Bitcoin ETF prospectus to include the advent of quantum computing as a threat to investors.

Fortunately, we have people like the Bitcoin devs behind the QRAMP improvement proposal and Project 11 joining BIP-360 trying to move the conversation in a positive direction. We’d be lying if we didn’t admit that we consider ourselves on the leading edge of this movement as well.

In brighter news, traditional networking stacks are already ahead of us when it comes to upgrading their protocols, as OpenSSH 10 just released their post-quantum cryptography solutions. This is bullish news for getting to use our existing infrastructure for trusted connections between peers Of course, security is an ever-evolving space that you have to keep an eye on, and even quantum computer operators are not immune to threat vectors. Don’t let your guard down!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is D-Wave really capable of factoring a 2048-bit RSA key?

Initial reports of "A First Successful Factorization of RSA-2048 Integer by D-Wave Quantum Computer" were found to be far from breaking real-world encryption, as the underlying trick was to use keys with consecutive factors. While there are infinitely many of these keys, the odds that your keys are one of them is vanishingly small.

2. What’s up with that huge bitcoin wallet that was dormant for a decade?

Well, we have our own opinions, but the main thing to understand is that we don’t know! It’s unclear if the rightful earner of that block reward benefitted from selling it, and there’s no way to know unless the person reliably attested their ownership a long time ago. This is what quantum vulnerabilities look like, and it’s important not to sugarcoat the uncertainty that reigns in a quantum supremacy regime.

Have a question? Just e-mail us at team at quantumdoomclock dot com. Below are the top questions we have received since our last update.

The Quantum Doom Clock is brought to you by Richard Carback and Colton Dillion, the cofounders of Quip Network

The Quantum Doom Clock is a monthly mailing list that summarizes news for Quantum Computing and its effects on the cryptography and cryptocurrency spaces. We do not sell your e-mail.