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Monarch Quantum closed a $55M oversubscribed growth round today — six months after founding and already past $115M in total capital and contracts — to scale production of its Quantum Light Engines, which replace bench-top optical systems with integrated photonic modules for quantum computing, sensing, and networking. Meanwhile, Google's March 2026 study on elliptic-curve cryptography continued dominating coverage: the paper shows that ECDLP-256 (the math protecting Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most TLS connections) may be breakable with fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and roughly 90 million Toffoli gates — about 100× fewer operations than RSA-2048 and 10× fewer resources than earlier estimates. No machine today is anywhere close to those logical-qubit counts, but the trajectory is no longer abstract. And IonQ confirmed a deal with Singapore-based Horizon Quantum to deliver a 6th-generation chip-based 256-qubit trapped-ion system — 256 qubits with all-to-all connectivity and 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity — expanding Horizon's multi-modal testbed.