Google and IBM have also posted progress updates in recent months, and some in crypto called the news alarming.
But Graham Cooke, a Google veteran-turned blockchain CEO, pushed back on the panic, saying “Your wallet’s math is stronger than the fabric of spacetime itself.”
The company frames the chip as a step toward practical, fault-tolerant quantum machines that could handle very large problems.
That kind of scale is what makes some people worry about cryptography, because certain quantum algorithms work very differently from the classical math that protects keys today.
Microsoft built a 1-million-qubit quantum computer.
Bitcoin holders are panicking—this could crack crypto encryption.
But your seed phrase has 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations.
Those announcements mean companies are getting closer to solving long-standing engineering problems, but they do not equal an instant ability to undo modern cryptography.
Cryptography experts point out that breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve keys needs not just more physical qubits but stable, error-corrected logical qubits and huge run-times.
Estimates vary widely, but respected analysis has shown that breaking a 256-bit elliptic curve in a practical time window would require millions or at least many hundreds of thousands of physical qubits once error correction is counted.
A 24-word seed phrase?
That’s 340 septillion trillion MORE combinations than a 12-word phrase.
We’re approaching 10^77 possibilities – nearly as many as atoms in the observable universe (10^80):
Based on reports and public comments from practitioners, wallet math is not the whole story but it matters.
Featured image from Getty Images, chart from TradingView
