CTRL/SHIFT - 14 06 2026 PARTHENOPE STAGE - THE QUANTUM RISK HORIZON

So, welcome everyone to the panel, the quantum risk horizon, the road to quantum readiness and the institutional response. So, today we will discuss how banks, financial institution, and digital asset players should think about quantum risk. So, how exposed they really are and how threat can be measured and what harvest now decrypt later actually means and what a credible path toward quantum readiness should look like. So, let's start from the institutional perspective. Soil, when banks and financial institutions look at quantum, how exposed are they are they really to to this quantum risk?

Is this already a board level concern or still mostly treated as a future technical problem?

Um hello everyone. Can you guys hear me? This one. Okay, this one. All right.

I hope you can hear me now. All right, perfect. So, uh there are two parts to this question. One is uh how vulnerable are they and is it really a risk and two is are they even noticing it or talking about it? So, um absolutely vulnerable.

So, today's cryptography is, you know, the way it is structured right now is destined to be broken. The current cryptography as as you saw earlier uh rests on you know, mathematical equations and quantum computers are designed basically to process things faster um and would make the cryptography irrelevant. I think about um without going into the the structure, I would just like to explain like I would explain to my 6-year-old daughter, who's not 6 anymore, by the way, um that if you have a lock and a combination lock and you think that oh, uh uh quantum would actually guess the code faster, it's not. Quantum would actually dismantle the lock right in front of you. So, it is not about, you know, reverse engineering.

It's basically protecting the lock, protecting your asset. So, um it is it's definitely there is significant vulnerability. There is significant vulnerability across the board. Um you know, we we here in this in this uh group talk about blockchains um and digital assets, but it goes beyond that. It goes to uh long-lived data, data that, you know, we'd like to store for 20, 30, 50 years, like health care records, and it goes to, you know, telecommunications, energy, ports, infrastructure, and everything of that sort needs to be protected.

And the second part of the question is, do uh senior leaders recognize it? Do senior leaders uh realize the risk? Um the answer is in between. Based on our conversations uh with various senior leaders in various countries, to be honest, like talk to people in the US, talk to people in Canada, you know, one of the largest banks in Canada, one of the largest conglomerates in India, one of, you know, uh few major banks across uh North America. The answer is somewhere between.

Um some senior leaders are cognizant. Some senior leaders are pushing it down. Um but it is not where the urgency is not there yet. Uh only 5% of institutions are worried about it. And in my opinion, I think it's too late.

I think they need to uh get their act together and uh at least start realizing and start putting plans together. Uh it is getting on the um agenda by the risk officers, technology risk officers, and realizing it. But the urgency is not there, which worries me a lot. Um earlier we had a conversation and and uh I'm sure you're going to bring it up that there are two factions to the to the entire quantum thing. But I'm on the fact I'm on the side where the sky is falling and everybody needs to actually uh you know, kind of find cover.

Thank you. Thank you. Uh Fabrizio, before institution can respond to quantum risk, they need to understand how to measure it. So, what are the key variables that determine whether a system is truly quantum exposed? Are we talking about cryptographic algorithms, data sensitivity, time horizon, or something else?

The key variable is actually IQ, in my opinion. Like like literally like I I was talking with, you know, some guys from some banks before here, and I'm like, "Do you have a road map for quantum thing?" And this guy was probably a big deal. I don't know. Yeah, sure, we have.

And then, you know, you dig a deep deeper, and everyone was like, "Yeah, yeah, we are, you know, thinking very hard about this." Yeah, the presence is, "Yeah, we are all right on top of it." And then, you go all the way to the end of the food chain, and we are thinking very hard about it pretty much means there's a you know, just one junior engineer in a shitty basement that is basically, you know, has everything on his shoulders and he's the only [ __ ] that [snorts] they put, you know, up to that job, and is desperate. So, I think that yeah, we we we can we can measure uh you know, we can talk about fidelity counts, cubic counts, what all the biggest quantum players are doing. Uh is their strategy like open or are they like more advanced that they pretend to be and they are not releasing research?

All that is fine and you know, about that I can just say that it seems like everyone is pretty much in line with the road map that they established. But in the end, the real measurable thing is the amount of intellectual capital that institutions deploy on the problem. And in my opinion, at the moment uh the overwhelming majority of institutions are still like in the performative stage. They are realizing that the problem is real, the pretty timeline is real, but they are not really deploying pretty much anyone. They're just like, you know, probably getting scammed by, I don't know, some shitty contractors around or yeah, assuming some interns to do that kind of stuff.

Uh the cool thing and the fine thing, I think, is that paradoxically to protect yourself against quantum threats, you don't need you do not need advanced quantum knowledge. This is what a lot of people misunderstand. So, quantum knowledge is needed to have estimates of how, you know, far down the road quantum computers are to become relevant. But the field that is about quantum protection, it is called post-quantum cryptography, has almost nothing to do with quantum science. That is basically classical cryptography that we know is resistant to quantum threats.

So, it's basically like saying, I build armored doors. I do not need to be an expert in building guns or cannons. The only thing that I have to know is how massive the projectile and how fast the projectile I'm building the door are for are. That that's everything I need to know. So, this is good because uh usually classical cryptographers are way more abundant as a resource than, you know, pure quantum cryptographers or quantum computer builders.

But yeah, to answer your question, I think we should The thing that we should really measure is the amount of resources that are invested in this thing at the moment. We know that the attacking side is investing literally billions of dollars per year to progress as fast as possible. And yeah, that's where we are.

Thank you for being here. So, now let's move to Bitcoin and crypto more broadly. Uh Eric, the quantum debate often becomes ideological very quickly. Uh from your perspective, what is uh um the the real vulnerability in crypto today? Uh for example, exposed public keys, old wallets, or coordinated consensus changes.

What What do you see in in the cryptosphere now?

Uh well, frankly, uh all of the above. It's uh So, quantum and Bitcoin, it's uh it's are interesting together because Bitcoin has sort of emerged as the quantum grand prize. It's uh both a network that has uh trillions of dollars of value locked up in exposed public keys. And it's also a system that is uh has designed itself to be very slow to change. Uh so, there are there are some people that say that the only the only real point of building a quantum computer is to steal Satoshi's Bitcoin.

Like, that's the That's the If you build a business on building a quantum computer, maybe that'll be the biggest biggest uh you know, profit that you can that you can make. Um so, uh it's And And And where we are in terms of like adapting or responding to this threat, I think it is fair to say that I mean up until this year it has been extremely bad. If you If you spoke with um some people that are considered to be technical leaders within um the Bitcoin development community uh it would be very common to hear people say that quantum is [ __ ] uh that it's uh And And And when they say that it's [ __ ] they don't mean that it's like a fairy tale that someone made up. Well, kind of, but uh they more they more Many of them think that uh scaling error correction for more and more qubits becomes exponentially exponentially hard in the same way that it becomes exponentially hard to break a classical uh key with the number of bits. So, it's not that they say like you quantum physics isn't real, quantum mechanics is not real, you cannot build a quantum computer.

They are saying that it's it's going to be costly and exponentially costly so as to crack a key uh in the similar way that it's exponentially costly to crack to crack a uh classical key. Uh that is not true. And we have already seen that uh you know, with the Willow chip and other experiments in quantum that it's hard to build a quantum quantum computer. It's difficult, but there's no evidence I mean, it might be the case, but there's no evidence that says it is exponentially hard. Uh so, the the response has been very slow.

And you also have a lot of people saying, "Okay, I believe that maybe there can be a quantum computer, but it's not going to happen until let's say 2040 or 2035." Uh which is also I mean, people are just guessing and uh it go it kind of goes counter to the uh security conservatism like that we have in in crypto overall. Like we we don't have uh 256-bit keys because we think that the a classical computer that can crack 256-bit is around the corner. We have it because it's so far that it's never going to happen. Uh so, you don't you don't take risks with existential um threats uh and just try to be just good enough until until until everything fails.

You need to be prepared way ahead and we haven't been that way in Bitcoin, but it's starting to change now. I think the Google paper that came out, the Oracle atomic paper that came out and also there's also this little eigen layer experiment where they're they they took from the Google paper the number of Toffoli gates and qubits that needed to run Shor's algorithm and they're using AI so they have like tons of different cloud and GPT-5 agents in parallel that are trying to squeeze down the number of Toffoli gates and qubits that you need to create quantum circuit that is capable of running Shor's algorithm. So people when when they're starting I think now when people are starting to see how quickly things accelerate with AI, it helps people to understand that that can also happen with quantum and you can also it's also combined thing, right? So AI's ex- is can also accelerate quantum. I think even with AI outside of the question, we still have to act now and today, but I think this is something that is helping people to to to move.

But the the the problem is is is multifaceted. There's tons of capital at risk. There's a migration issue to move those exposed pub keys to secure addresses. And how long do you like if someone has let's say you're a Bitcoiner, you have $10 million in Bitcoin and now we're going to say after 5 years you're not going to be able to spend that type of quantum vulnerable key anymore, how long how long is the heads up that you should give a person? Because to me like a freedom technology like Bitcoin it's you're supposed to be able to go to jail for 10 years and come back and still have your Bitcoin.

If it's not then you should then you should bury down some gold in the ground. So that's why like we need to have these very very long migration windows and right now we're already running out of like what starts to look like a too short of a migration window even if we start now. if you look at like aggressive quantum timelines.

Thank you, Eric. Now, moving from the threat to the response. Soil, what does a credible institution roadmap to quantum readiness look like? So, where should institutions start in this moment?

Yeah, so first and foremost, all institutions should start by understanding and and and doing an introspection, basically, and ensuring that hey, we have a problem, right? And accepting that there is a Q-Day, which is a day unknown to us, is coming. And then start looking at, I think the first, I would say, 0 to 3 months should be spent on understanding their own technology, understanding their own cryptography. I'm sure when you start doing that, you'll find a bunch of skeletons buried in the closet. You know, taking the skeletons out and, you know, understanding, hey, these are all the vulnerabilities that are happening.

And then, you know, start working toward creating a migration plan, all right? And that's where a terminology known as crypto agility comes into play, where you start to create a process while your The idea is that, hey, you got to change the tires when the when the train is still running, or when the car is still running. And how do you do that? Um and so, that's that's a big that's a big challenge. Um and that's where crypto agility comes into play, where you actually start to build a hybrid technology.

And that's where you, you know, once you identify where the vulnerabilities are, you start prioritizing them and say, okay, I'm going to address this, that, and the other first, uh which are most more complex, or which are required to be upgraded sooner than later, because they're highly um it would be a high impact to either their company or or or the country in many cases. So, it's important that that gets factored in and then slowly move toward implementation of a hybrid cryptography, right? So, part on PQC, part on old cryptography because you don't want to just you know start it on one day because you know the as I said, right? The car still needs to run. Um and once that happens, you know, which would take close to 3 years for all this process to take place and then you start monitoring and that is after 3 years you start monitoring in terms of hey whether it's working, it's not working, what do we need to go back?

Do you want to change? Do you want to go back to the hybrid approach for certain period of time and then going to into post-quantum. So, it's a it's one of the very important factor is also vendors because you can you know, you can build a shield around your own house, but there are vendors that you depend on. And if those vendors also need to be PQC ready. Ensuring that those vendors are PQC ready is critical.

So, there are it's multiple steps that need to happen. Um and that's why it has to happen as of yesterday, not as of now. It has to happen as of yesterday.

Thank you. Now, Fabrizio, let's talk about harvest now, decrypt later is one of the most discussed risk in this space. Uh which types of institutional data or financial infrastructure are most exposed to this kind of attack and what should already be protected today?

Sure. Uh so, for people that don't know, uh harvest now, decrypt later means uh intercepting encrypted traffic, which is safe today. Um and then as soon as quantum computers become available, we decrypt the traffic and extract the information. This is especially noticeable at state actor levels where, you know, a foreign state may be interested in again intercepting large amount of data from other countries and then build a knowledge database about it. So basically, the way, you know, communication happens today, it's a bit complicated, but we use some algorithms that are called public key cryptography algorithm to basically share a secret that is called a session key, basically.

And then we use this session key to encrypt the traffic using a symmetric key cryptography scheme. Now, the reason why I'm telling you this is that the symmetric part is totally quantum safe at the moment. We're using AES, which is a quantum safe algorithm, more or less. But the problem is that, you know, the way you create the session key, you share this secret, is quantum weak. So in a way, we can use the quantum computer to extract the key and then we use the key to decrypt the entire conversation.

And that is very bad. There are different another thing that just, you know, an interjection that I wanted to to to make. Some people say that quantum is a big threat also with respect to zero knowledge cryptography schemes. We know that zero knowledge are, you know, way to privately prove that you did, you know, something or that you have some piece of information without revealing anything about it. That is almost 99% of the times [ __ ] in the sense that many quantum cryptography schemes, all almost all of them, have some property that is called zero statistical security.

That basically means even if you can break the scheme, you cannot extract that information. And if you think about it, it makes sense. If I need to prove to you that I know a 400 TB piece of information, and the proof just takes 3 KB, it's just like a matter of physics. There's no way that you can encrypt that much information into that small thing. What you can do when you have quantum computers is that you can break some zero knowledge schemes, and you can prove false things, but you cannot invert, you know, proofs.

That That's very important. If someone tells you this, they're lying. Now, the kind of data that is very important is especially, I think, medical data. Uh The reason is that in almost all countries, uh there are very strict regulations that say that you need to store that data safely for like 50 years or more. You know, that is going to be a huge problem.

Uh Now, imagine that this data can be decrypted and sold. The first buyer will probably be your insurance provider. They will probably know that, you know, maybe, I don't know, you had some genetic profilation of sorts. Uh Many of those are already sold to insurances, to be honest, but, you know, suddenly your insurance premium goes up 10x, and you don't know why. Then, there is obviously intelligence data and military security data, uh which I don't think it's a problem for the, you know, small person actor, but it's going to be a big problem for national states.

So, I would say for for us, like normal people, probably health care information is is the most crucial one. Uh For banks, I mean, obviously, financial statements. Uh Again, uh one very important thing that I want to stress is that at the moment, probably 90% of the effort that is put into the economy is around building trust. When you have a new client, when you develop a new product, the real point is that you make people trust you. The way you provide is good, that your service is good, that your product is good.

When you break cryptography, you break trust. Maybe there is nothing on your bank account, or maybe you are super healthy, but the problem is that you won't trust your hospital, and you won't trust your bank afterwards. You won't trust your cryptocurrency, you won't trust anything around you. And that basically breaks down the economy at a very fundamental level. That has nothing to do with the products the economy, you know, makes go around.

But it's it's not about that. It's about breaking trust, which is I think the scarcest and most fundamental resource in in society at the moment.

Thank you, Fabrizio. Now, let's jump back to to crypto. Eric, protocol upgrades are never just technical. They are also social and political. If quantum risk becomes urgent, how realistic is it for decentralized networks to coordinate timely migration to quantum resistance standards?

Yeah, so um the thing with decentralized networks is that they don't all have to do the same thing at the same time. So, if you have a decentralized network, some parts of the that network can say "Hey, we actually do think that quantum is [ __ ] We're not going to upgrade. We're going to stick to this version." Then they become a fork of Bitcoin, and the the market essentially then decides which one of these two versions of Bitcoin, the one that has started its migration, or the one that thinks this is [ __ ] The market assigns, like when you trade Bitcoin one versus Bitcoin two. This has happened This maybe sounds weird, but it has happened multiple times.

Uh the pre- the previous time this happened in Bitcoin one when when the market couldn't agree or when the network couldn't agree should the block size be 8 megabyte or 1 megabyte? Like how many what should the size of the blockchain be? How fast should it grow? When we couldn't agree on that, now there are two different Bitcoins. There's Bitcoin Cash and there's Bitcoin.

So that disagreements happen in in in in networks is usual is common. It's the purpose also that this is the mechanism that makes it decentralized that we can disagree. And we can create our own coins. But generally there tends to be a winner is elected because it's just the way of the market that uh uh you want to be a part of the largest network effect. So even sometimes if you disagree you'll still if you want to use Bitcoin maybe you'll accept that some technical parameters that you didn't agree agree on.

That's what most people are doing. So one tends to grow and and become the dominant one after a while. This is what happened after the the block size conflict, you know, Bitcoin Cash they got to have their own chain but it's now like less than 0.02% of the value or something. So there's going to be disagreement.

There it's going to be difficult to reach consensus and and and the thing that is going to create the largest divide uh is because it's much worse than any any type of conflict that we that we have ever had before. And the conflict goes like this. So Satoshi's coins the reason that we talk about Satoshi's coins is because it's a it's a simple way to describe the types of quantum vulnerable Bitcoin that no one is going to be around to move. Give The assumption here is that Satoshi is dead is not around and he's not going to move those coins. And there's a lots of them.

So there are some people who are against any, you know, ever touching them. Like ever freezing them. If you freeze Satoshi's coins that's like I don't know, killing Jesus. So

[laughter]

uh it's just the point of the system is the satoshis, you know.

[laughter]

Uh so the for the for many people the point of Bitcoin is that you cannot take away someone's Bitcoin. It doesn't matter how scared you are of quantum, you're not allowed to to take it away. Other people say, "Well, if we don't fix this then Bitcoin is dead because a quantum attacker is going to do it and he's going to dump the price to zero and then the chain can't even secure itself because the value of the uh mining reward will be so low that no one will mine it and someone with a calculator can break Bitcoin. So uh these two camps are not going to agree. They're going to split and fork and then uh one of them is going to win in the market and then the other is going to going to lose.

I mean, theoretically both could be like uh there it could be a split and both of them are equally valuable, but that is very unlikely. Um so I I guess that answers your your your questions. There's much much more about it like around the technical considerations that is also going to lead to debate. For example, in Bitcoin and in cryptocurrency in general, we have um uh we we always take like cryptographic cryptographic problems, but since we in crypto we have such weird constraints like it needs to be super fast and it needs to be super small and it needs to be super difficult to [ __ ] up for our average user that actually deals with their own uh cryptographic keys so that the the the space in which we deal with with with with cryptography in cryptocurrency, it's like um it's like doing skateboard tricks with cryptography. You have to do them really fast in a special way.

It has to look smooth. Uh so it's not like normal. It's not like the challenge for banks that okay, they need to upgrade to a post-quantum safe scheme. We have to upgrade to a post-quantum safe scheme that is both like uh the the security parameters needs to go back way, way back because we only get like to change this is very difficult. So we want to base it on like um a hash-based cryptography, something that is very very very uh well tested.

We also want the sizes of the signatures to be extremely small. We also want them to be cheap to generate and if and also want it to be impossible for the user to [ __ ] up. So we can't have like stateful setups where if you double sign you lose your key or things like that. So we have for us it's exceptionally difficult to get it right. Which is why we're going to fight about it a lot.

But as as things gets closer and closer to Q day, we're going to have to agree. It's going to be the most difficult thing that the Bitcoin community has ever done. But the opportunity here that we have and we're going to end on this point. The opportunity that we have is that when you compare Bitcoin to gold gold is good because it cannot change. It doesn't matter if the community goes crazy, gold is gold.

Bitcoin can change and that can either be a strength or a negative. It can be a strength if we can show that we can adapt. So gold for example, if there's an asteroid that comes and inflates the supply of gold by three times. Now that's very bad for gold and now gold cannot do anything about it. Gold cannot launch a rocket missile and go and explode the asteroid.

It just can't cuz it's there. But the Bitcoin community the Bitcoin is not only the coins, it's the community around it. And they can do things. So well so our our asteroid in the sky moment is quantum. And if we act right as humans, we can protect ourselves against the danger and we can neutralize the threat.

So this is the time for Bitcoin to prove that a human based consensus monetary system has advantages that is superior than that of gold or at least a pretty good alternative. And not or if we fail, we've demonstrated that it was a bad idea to rely on humans. Okay.

Okay. Now before we close, one final flash question for all of you. Looking at the next five years, what is the one thing that will matter the most for quantum readiness? Maximum three words without explanation.

Institutions. Uh [ __ ] three words is difficult, man. Um

The one is good.

One is Yeah, uh

You go with

Institutions not [ __ ] it up. I don't know. People not [ __ ] it up. That's Yes.

Uh I would also say institutions, self-introspection.

Artificial general intelligence.

Yeah, true.

Okay, thank you for the insights and for this discussion. And now we'll we'll jump on to the next panel. Thank you again.

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