11/20 update below. This post was originally published on November 19
Bitcoin, ethereum and smaller cryptocurrencies have plunged over the last month as crash fears suddenly sweep through the market.
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The bitcoin price has dropped under $100,000 per bitcoin, giving up the psychological level and dragging ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies lower even as analysts claim the liquidity “flood gates” have been opened.
Now, as traders brace for a potential $1 trillion bitcoin and crypto market crash, the threat to crypto from quantum computers has led to ethereum cofounder and the project’s spiritual leader Vitalik Buterin warning elliptic curve cryptography could break before the next U.S. presidential election in 2028.
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Vitalik Buterin, a cofounder of ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, has issued a stark warning over ethereum’s future.
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“Elliptic curves are going to die,” Buterin warned, referring to one of the foundational pillars of bitcoin, ethereum and crypto encryption, during the Buenos Aires Devconnect conference in comments reported by DL News.
11/20 update: Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has also warned that the growing influence of Wall Street giant BlackRock over cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and ethereum could cause problems for the networks.
“How do you avoid capture by big behemoths like BlackRock?” Buterin was asked on stage, according to a DL News report, referring to a surge of institutional interest after the launch of BlackRock’s bitcoin and ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in early 2024.
Buterin warned that if BlackRock and other large institutions keep expanding their ethereum holdings, the network faces the possibility that those focused on decentralization get crowded out and base-layer choices are optimized for institutions, making it infeasible for typical users to run nodes, and in turn driving centralization.
“It easily drives other people away,” Buterin said. “We need to focus on the things that would otherwise be in short supply: global, permissionless, and censorship-resistant protocol.”
Last month, Google claimed a breakthrough in quantum computing, following in Microsoft’s footsteps after it unveiled a new quantum-enabling chip in February.
These and similar developments have catapulted quantum computing’s risk to bitcoin, ethereum and crypto up the agenda.
“Given the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next U.S. presidential election,” quantum computer researcher Scott Aaronson wrote in blog post this month, referring to how a quantum computer could break the encryption that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
The “magnitude of the threat that quantum poses to all blockchains,” has given crypto investor Nic Carter “an urgent sensation like I have to act on it now with as much intensity as I can muster,” he posted to X.
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The bitcoin price has dropped sharply over the last month, dragging down ethereum and other major cryptocurrenices.
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“We don’t need to panic, but we need to get serious,” Alex Pruden, the chief executive of quantum computing risk company Project 11 posted to X, adding that “quantum computers at sufficient scale will break crypto at the most fundamental level imaginable.”
Meanwhile, bitcoin developers have also been warned they need to prepare for the post-quantum world that could become a reality by 2030.
“You should have a few good years ahead of you but I wouldn’t hold my bitcoin,” Théau Peronnin, the chief executive of Alice & Bob, told Fortune during the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
“They need to fork [move to a stronger blockchain] by 2030, basically,” Peronnin said. “Quantum computers will be ready to be a threat a bit later than that.”