Author: Ma He, Foresight News
On June 22, Trump signed two executive orders in a single day. One requires all U.S. federal agencies to upgrade their cryptographic locks to a new standard by 2030 to resist the threat of quantum computing decryption; the other orders the Department of Energy to lead the construction of a "National Quantum Computer."
Quantum computing has transitioned from a technical discussion in laboratories to a mandatory national schedule.
At the beginning of 2025, tech industry titan Jensen Huang expressed pessimism about quantum computers, stating "a truly practical quantum computer might still be 15 to 30 years away." Yet, merely two months later, his attitude shifted. This year, NVIDIA released the AI-driven Ising model. Huang indicated that this would enable AI to become the control plane and operating system for quantum machines, transforming fragile qubits into scalable, highly reliable systems, and building standardized, industry-grade infrastructure for quantum computing.
Quantum computing, potentially supercharged by AI, may see its development pace accelerate significantly. The faster it progresses, the greater the daily growing threat to current system security.
The 2030 Deadline: A Hard Order for a Nationwide "Lock Change"
Once large-scale quantum computers emerge, the current cryptographic systems will be shattered. More insidiously, there's the strategy of harvest now, decrypt later—adversaries can store your encrypted data today and patiently crack it a decade later when quantum machines mature.
Hence, the U.S. government issued a hard deadline. All federal agencies must complete the migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) for key establishment in their high-value assets and high-impact systems by December 31, 2030. Additionally, they must complete the migration for digital signatures to PQC by December 31, 2031.
Each agency must appoint a PQC Migration Lead within 30 days, reporting directly to the White House OMB and the National Cyber Director. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) must initiate a PQC migration pilot for its own systems within 180 days and complete it by the end of 2027.
Furthermore, the Federal Acquisition Regulation will be revised within 180 days. All contractors supplying the U.S. government—from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to various IT service providers—must comply with PQC standards by 2030. The Department of Homeland Security will also assist critical infrastructure like the power grid, banks, hospitals, and communication operators in developing migration plans.
The U.S. government is leveraging administrative power to forcibly drive a massive upgrade of global internet security infrastructure.
The other document signed by Trump on the same day, "Unleashing the Next Frontier in Quantum Innovation," also placed the quantum computing race squarely on the table.
The U.S. government wants a massive machine delivered to the Department of Energy's national laboratories, one that truly solves problems classical supercomputers cannot. The White House requires the Department of Energy to publicly release technical specifications within 90 days and explore public-private partnership models within 180 days.
Perhaps this is the "Manhattan Project" moment for quantum computing. The government provides funding, policies, and orders, guiding through national will to accelerate the evolution of quantum information technology from laboratory prototypes to engineering-grade tools.
While the U.S. races to upgrade its cryptography, the cryptography underpinning the crypto industry is already fraught with peril.
The Crypto Industry Resists Quantum Computing
The foundation of Bitcoin, the ECDSA elliptic curve signature, is theoretically vulnerable to cracking by quantum computers.
According to research data released by BTQ Technologies in October 2025, approximately 6.65 million Bitcoins (worth about $745 billion at the time) have their public keys permanently exposed on the blockchain. This includes 1.9 million Bitcoins in early P2PK addresses and about 4 million Bitcoins in reused addresses.
These BTCs don't need to wait for quantum computers to actively attack transaction broadcasts—the public keys have been lying on the blockchain for over a decade. Once quantum computers mature, they can slowly reverse-engineer the private keys offline.
The Bitcoin base layer protocol has not activated a soft fork in over four years since November 2021. The BIP-360 proposal suggests some mitigation measures, but a complete solution remains distant. Historical precedent is also not optimistic. Bitcoin's SegWit upgrade took three years from proposal in December 2015 to mainstream adoption in December 2018.
In January this year, BTQ Technologies Corp. launched a testnet named Bitcoin Quantum. This testnet is fully open and permissionless, inviting miners, developers, researchers, and users to run nodes, build tools, audit cryptography, and stress-test quantum-resistant transactions before any mainnet migration.
However, achieving consensus among multiple parties for subsequent steps remains a significant challenge.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rebutted that the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin is severely exaggerated. "This isn't a problem unique to cryptocurrency; it's something the entire world needs to address. We are working directly with core developers to handle the quantum issue."
Beyond Bitcoin, other project protocols are also vigorously advancing their anti-quantum plans.
The Ethereum Foundation has established a dedicated Post-Quantum Security research team and prioritized PQC. Nico, lead of the Ethereum Foundation's privacy project Kohaku, stated that Ethereum can already begin preparing at the account level for the post-quantum era without waiting for a base-layer hard fork upgrade.
Solana has established the Falcon signature standard and announced a three-phase migration roadmap. The NEAR development team plans to add a quantum-resistant secure signature scheme to its testnet by the end of Q2 2026. Zcash expects to achieve protocol-level post-quantum privacy protection through the Tachyon upgrade by the end of 2026.
In this life-or-death race against quantum computing, the highly centralized federal agencies have already pressed the hard switch for a '5-year countdown.' For decentralized networks with concerning governance efficiency that rely on consensus, the real test is not when the quantum crisis arrives, but whether the industry can complete this anti-quantum upgrade before Satoshi Nakamoto's black box is fully deciphered.
