Algorand has emerged as an early standout in the crypto market’s latest quantum security debate after a recent Google Quantum AI paper highlighted blockchain as an example of post-quantum cryptography being deployed on networks.
The paper gained attention for sharpening concerns about Bitcoin and Ethereum, two networks whose size, age, and design choices could make the transition to future quantum-proof infrastructure slower and more complex.
Against this backdrop, Algorand’s quiet work on digital signatures, national attestation, and key rotation for Falcon suddenly looked like a practical head start rather than a niche technology experiment.
The high-profile shift helped send Algorand’s token soaring over the past week, with traders treating Google’s paper as validation of work already underway on the network.
According to crypto slate According to the data, ALGO, the blockchain network’s native token, has been the top performer over the past week, rising nearly 50% to $0.12 at the time of writing. Notably, that price performance comes less than a week after the token fell to an all-time low of $0.08.
Algorand’s quantum computing quietly leads Bitcoin and Ethereum
Algorand’s advantage over Bitcoin and Ethereum is narrower than the recent frenzy suggests, but it’s also more concrete than what many large chains are currently exhibiting.
In its paper, Google described Algorand as an example of a practical implementation of post-quantum cryptography on a quantum-vulnerable blockchain.
That distinction was important. Although he did not say that Algorand solved the problem end-to-end, he did note that the network had moved from theory to real-world implementation.
Algorand’s core consensus and built-in transactions still rely on Ed25519, but it remains vulnerable in sufficiently advanced quantum scenarios.
However, the network has already introduced Falcon digital signatures for smart transactions and proof of state (cryptographic proofs used to verify blockchain state across the chain). We also make Falcon verification available as a primitive for developers building on top of Algorand Virtual Machine, giving the ecosystem a set of practical tools rather than just a roadmap.
The network executed its first post-quantum secured transaction in 2025. This was a milestone that set us apart from many of our larger competitors who are still debating design paths, governance tradeoffs, and implementation timelines.
Algorand also allows users to rotate the private key associated with their account. This feature does not eliminate the underlying threat, but may make future migrations more manageable.
It is this combination, live transaction capabilities, developer tools, proof-of-state support, and native key rotation that made Algorand central to this document’s distribution to the market.
In an area where much of the debate surrounding quantum risk remains theoretical, Algorand could point to infrastructure already in operation.
Bitcoin and Ethereum face quantum computing risks
The concern for Bitcoin is not only whether quantum computers will eventually be able to derive private keys from public information, but also how much of the network’s legacy footprint will be difficult to migrate in time.
The paper states that a quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could crack the elliptic curve cryptography that protects Bitcoin wallets, a much lower threshold than previous estimates of millions.
Google’s own cutting-edge chip, Willow, remains well below that level, but the revised estimates increase scrutiny of how much risk Bitcoin could be exposed to if the technology advances faster than expected.
This burden is especially acute because some of Bitcoin’s oldest addresses keep their public keys visible on the chain.
The paper noted that an estimated 6.7 million BTC resides in old public key addresses, including coins long associated with Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
Even outside of these legacy wallets, the migration challenges are politically and technically heavy for networks that prioritize backward compatibility and are cautious about base layer changes.
In the case of Bitcoin, quantum risk is as much a governance and coordination issue as it is a cryptographic issue.
On the other hand, the potential for Ethereum to be exposed to the same quantum computing risks is slightly broader.
When an Ethereum user submits a transaction, the public key associated with that account becomes permanently visible on-chain. According to the paper, this would expose the top 1,000 Ethereum wallets holding approximately 20.5 million ETH to sufficiently sophisticated quantum attacks.
It has also identified at least 70 major contracts where custodian keys are visible on-chain, ultimately controlling far more than the ETH it directly holds, including the authority to mint stablecoins and other system-critical privileges.
Additionally, the attack surface extends beyond wallets and contract administrators.
Ethereum’s proof-of-stake validation set, its primary Layer 2 network, and parts of its data availability architecture all rely on cryptographic components that are described as vulnerable in the paper.
According to the paper, approximately 37 million ETH is staked, and much of Ethereum’s transaction load currently flows through rollups and bridges that inherit assumptions from the base layer.
This means that a full-fledged post-quantum transition will need to impact not just users and verifiers, but also networks of applications and the scaling systems built around them.
(Tag translation) Bitcoin
