Lee Reiners (Duke Financial Economics Center; Duke University School of Law) has posted The Quantum Clock Is Ticking: Financial Stability and the Regulation of Quantum-Vulnerable Digital Assets on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In March 2026, researchers at Google Quantum AI published resource estimates showing that the elliptic-curve cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other major blockchains could be broken with far fewer quantum-computing resources than previously believed. The authors validated their estimates through a zero-knowledge proof while withholding the underlying circuits. Within two months, an independent researcher reproduced the circuits and a public challenge improved on them. The quantum threat to digital assets has moved from a remote theoretical concern to a concrete migration problem. At the same time, U.S. policymakers are integrating quantum-vulnerable blockchain infrastructure into the financial system through federally regulated stablecoins, chartered crypto institutions, exchange-traded products, and tokenized securities. This Article examines the collision between those policy trajectories. It argues that financial stability should govern the response and that the federal objective should be containment of transmission from a failing legacy network into regulated finance. Congress should create a quantum-resilience perimeter under which covered intermediaries, stablecoin issuers, investment products, and market infrastructures may, after a defined transition, operate only through networks and digitalasset arrangements certified as quantum-resilient. Qualification should require protection of every material cryptographic function and a credible plan to prevent mass unauthorized monetization of assets controlled by deprecated credentials. Protocol communities would retain authority to choose the technical method, including migration, quarantine, recovery, rate limits, issuer-led reissuance, or permanent unspendability. Nonqualified networks could continue through self-custody and peer-to-peer use, but they would remain outside regulated custody, collateral, derivatives, tokenized markets, and U.S.-regulated dollar channels. The proposal thus protects financial stability without directing consensus rules or prohibiting private ownership.
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