Ethereum’s Quantum Strategy with Justin Drake

**Justin Drake** (0:00)
One interesting shift of mindset for me in the last few months is that I've stopped thinking about post quantum as a hurdle that we have to overcome. And I think of it more as an opportunity, right? It's an opportunity for Ethereum to stand out as the very first global financial system that is post quantum secure, not just relative to its competitors, like Bitcoin and whatnot, but also relative to Fiat and TratFi. And I think it would send a very strong message and kind of be a very natural security shutting point for the world to migrate over to Ethereum.

**David Hoffman** (0:45)
Bankless Nation, we are once again joined with Justin Drake. We're going to talk about quantum computing as it relates to crypto, Bitcoin, and also Ethereum. Justin, welcome back to the podcast.

**Justin Drake** (0:56)
Hi, guys. Thanks for having me again.

**David Hoffman** (0:59)
So quantum has become kind of a big looming threat to our industry. We've always kind of known this. We have known this. We have known that this is a thing, that quantum is a thing. It's been largely theoretical. Over the last, I'll say, six months or so, quantum has firmly moved from theoretical to something materially impacting our industry. Starting with, I'll say, just like Bitcoin price, just because fund managers, even BlackRock, has put out pieces about the threat of quantum to the security and therefore the value of Bitcoin. And so we have anecdotally seen people de-weighting their portfolio of Bitcoin. Perhaps that has also suppressing the price of all the other assets in the industry. And not to just talk about price, but as we understand it, quantum really just impacts the way blockchains function. So this seems to be a fundamental problem of our industry as a whole, a hurdle that our industry has to get over that when crypto blockchain was created in the first place, we are not equipped to become post-quantum of an industry. So maybe to start off that with context, what is the timeline here that our industry needs to be aware of, the hurdle that's coming that we need to get over?
When is that hurdle coming? I've heard this become called Q day. When is Q day? How much time do we have to get over this quantum hurdle?

**Justin Drake** (2:28)
Yeah, so I just want to back up a little bit and kind of emphasize what you said, which is that in the last six to 12 months, we've had major breakthroughs. One of them is this notion of error correction. So we're able to go from so-called physical qubits, which are very noisy and error prone to like these perfectly logical qubits.
Right now, we can basically manufacture one logical qubit, but it's still a very important zero to one moment. And now it's about scaling it to multiple logical qubits. Another big breakthrough is on the algorithmic side of things. Previously, we thought it would take millions, actually tens of millions of physical qubits in order to break our beloved cryptography. But last year, there was a paper that made a 10x improvement, bringing it down to one million physical qubits.
And this year, we have another 10x improvement, bringing it down to 100,000 qubits. So the goalposts are coming closer and closer and closer. And you have this double exponential in some sense that will eventually cross. And then another thing that has happened is on the investment side of things. A lot of quantum startups have been raising billions of dollars. So last year, I believe we're talking on the order of $5 billion. And this is unprecedented. Previously, we were talking hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think the culminations of all of these things has really energized the public and led to this narrative, which has indeed potentially impacted the price of Bitcoin and Ether. Now, projecting into the future, my personal Q day is in 2032 This is a little bit of an optimistic take in the sense that it's possible they'll arrive a little bit later. But we need to be prepared in some sense for the worst case scenario. So I'd say there's at least a 1% chance that Q day is in 2032 More likely than not, double digit percentage that Q day is in 2032 Various experts that are super knowledgeable in the field will tell you somewhere between 2031 and 2038 maybe, and one of my friends who is in the industry, Steve Briley, who is the founder and CEO of one of the biggest quantum error correction companies in the world, who happens to be based in Cambridge, where I am. Our children went to the same class. His personal Q day was 2032, but he's had this date for 15 years, and it's always stayed the same.