The market appears to be reassessing the long-term technological risks in crypto following Google’s major quantum computing research update on Monday.
While leading coins like bitcoin and ether (ETH) have only seen modest moves in the past 24 hours, several cryptocurrencies tied to the quantum-resistant narrative have surged, with some rising more than 50%.
This outperformance of the so-called quantum-resistant tokens shows how quickly the market prices potential technological risks, even if they are still theoretical. While quantum computers capable of attacking Bitcoin are still years away, traders are already signaling an appetite for “future-proof” assets.
Late Monday, Google’s Quantum AI team suggested that quantum computers could break the elliptic-curve cryptography used by Bitcoin with fewer than 500,000 quantum qubits, significantly fewer than previously estimated. This led some analysts to cite 2029 as a potential deadline for Bitcoin and the wider blockchain ecosystem to bolster their defenses.
The study said a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could attack Bitcoin within nine minutes. A separate report highlighted Ethereum’s vulnerabilities and identified five potential attack vectors that could put an estimated $100 billion of assets at risk, including DeFi and tokenized holdings.
However, such machines do not exist and remain a threat that is still a few years away.
Still, over the past 24 hours, the market has shown increased interest in cryptocurrencies and projects that emphasize post-quantum cryptographic designs, future-proof security research, or that appear relatively more resilient than legacy chains.
In particular, Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL) and Cellframe (CEL) are up 50%, reflecting the growing market attention to true post-quantum protocols, according to data source Coingecko. Other tokens in the category, such as Abelian (ABEL), are up 25%, while Qubic (QUBIC) and QANplatform (QANX) have each gained 10%, and even the privacy-focused Zcash (ZEC) has added nearly 7% over the same period.
The market capitalization of this group of 20 coins has increased by 8% to $4.66 billion over the past 24 hours. It is worth noting that ZEC is not yet truly quantum resistant, but is still included in the category of data sources due to its advanced cryptographic foundations, such as zero-knowledge proofs and ongoing research into post-quantum secure ZK-SNARKs. These factors make it part of the “quantum conscious” narrative, even though it does not currently fully implement post-quantum cryptography.
Although the risks remain largely theoretical, they have influenced market behavior since last year. According to Charles Edwards, founder of Capriole Investments, concerns over quantum attacks contributed to Bitcoin’s decoupling from the rising stock market in the second half of 2025, with the cryptocurrency falling from $126,000 to $80,000 in the final months of the year.
“We’re already starting to see quantum risk being priced into Bitcoin. It’s the primary reason Bitcoin is trading -50% against the S&P 500 and -90% against gold since the inaugural Bitcoin Quantum Summit seven months ago,” Edwards said in a report in February.
Coincidentally, this was the very period when the quantum resistant leader ZEC organized a sharp rally. ZEC rose over 1,200% in the second half of 2025, reaching a high of $744.
