The quantum cryptography threat timeline is compressing faster than most security teams planned for. A CalTech/Oratomic joint paper concluded this week that breaking standard encryption may require as few as 10,000 qubits — not the millions cited in older estimates — and Google has moved its internal post-quantum migration deadline to 2029 after publishing research showing a 20x reduction in the qubit count needed to crack 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography. Nobel laureate John Martinis was direct about what that means for Bitcoin: when a transaction's public key is briefly exposed on-chain before block confirmation, a capable quantum computer could derive the private key in minutes, though he estimates the community has 5–10 years to migrate. On the hardware side, Singapore-based Horizon Quantum is acquiring a 256-qubit IonQ trapped-ion system — 99.99% gate fidelity, all-to-all connectivity — making it one of the few software-focused labs running a commercial system at that scale, which it plans to use for testing hardware-agnostic application stacks.