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Agent Unplugged #21: Quantum Resistance
Recorded: Dec. 12, 2025 Duration: 0:35:09Space Recording
Short Summary
Curanium has launched a groundbreaking quantum secure blockchain, addressing the imminent threat of quantum computing to traditional cryptography. As banks and crypto projects rush to adopt quantum security measures, the conversation highlights the urgent need for innovative solutions in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello. Hello baby.
Hey guys, can you hear me?
Yes.
Oh wow, We're live. Okay, cool.
I was trying to get through all the time, but it wasn't really working.
Hey, how are you guys today?
My name is Yannick.
I'm the co-host here together with Marco and Maz Zaman.
Yeah, Maz, maybe you can do a quick introduction first.
Yeah, sure, Yannick.
Thanks very much for having me.
So my name is Maz Zaman.
I am the Chief Growth Officer at Curanium.
And at Curanium, we built the world's first quantum secure
stateless hash based layer one blockchain
that's been built for financial institutions.
Happy to dive into more details, but yeah,
and happy to go into details about quantum security
and what it all means. A lot of people have heard of it, but yeah, happy to dive right in. And also
here to learn a lot about what you guys are doing in the agentic space. Really excited
about that too. Cheers.
Nice. Thank you. First off, Yannick, before we start, I do want to say, man, it's December.
We started this year in January and we made it it every month we had at least one space normally
two because it is supposed to be bi-weekly i think in july we even had three sessions
man this was an amazing time i'm really happy i really enjoyed discussing all kinds of topics
with you and having lots of impressive people like maz as our guests our main point i think
was always that people should learn something it's not just for people to show their projects and kind of get some attention maybe some new users
investors whatever but you have to learn and that's why i think oftentimes we did go very
philosophical uh but it's for a reason right i mean specifically ai has tons of potential
likewise it has quite a few risks and that's why there needs to be awareness. So thanks, Anik. Thanks, Maz, for joining today. And thanks for everyone that
actually listened in. I don't even know if this is going to be our last session this
year, but I just recapped what we did this year and it was super cool. I'm very happy.
Yeah, I didn't even realize that it's already like a full year. I think that's a nice achievement. And I must say that I personally have actually learned a lot,
you know, like by talking to all of these different people that we had on.
And I think today's session is probably going to be the epiphany of,
you know, like our stretching of our minds to trying to get to,
you know, get a grip on the concept of quantum
resistance and quantum computing and so on. I think maybe, you know, Mass, you will have to do
an introduction for everybody. Yeah, we'll see, guys. We'll see. I'm still trying to grasp it
myself. So, you know, we'll see if it's the epiphany, but I'm going to do my best to really
explain it as simple as possible. It took me quite a while to learn aboutiphany, but I'm going to do my best to really explain it as simple
as possible.
It took me quite a while to learn about it, even though I'm a bit of a physics nerd and
I've been into quantum mechanics for a long time, but being into it means I know nothing
about it.
So quantum computing is a reality.
So yeah, very keen to kind of jump in and talk through it.
Did you have any kind of specific questions in mind?
Actually, you know, before we get started, guys,
so firstly, congratulations.
Really cool that you guys have done it, you know, every month.
What sort of topics have you guys touched on in previous shows?
Wow, a lot, man.
Like, we touched on confidential compute.
We touched on also, very philosophical conversations that we had regarding like the influence of large language models on our society, on our brains, on our psychology and so on.
So like that has been, yeah, there have been many different people that come to us about different things.
been many different people that come to us about different things. I think maybe I can mention a
highlight for me was definitely when we went into the more philosophical side of what kind of effect
large language models might have on our base perception of reality and truth. Because
hands are token ticket true so
that's like always a topic that i love to speak about um but for marco you know marco maybe you
have something to say here too i mean i'm always a big privacy advocate i think it's still a massive
problem in ai i don't think it's very trivial to solve i think big ai players they don't have a
interest to solve it so it needs to come
from someone else the low-hanging fruit is that it comes from the crypto people both like
cryptography experts but in general anyone working in decentralized systems because
this has been cypherpunk from day one and people do care about privacy and it is definitely possible
to get to confidential compute with ai it's just we need different systems and that's
why i keep on kind of advocating for this but yeah man i keep on i just quickly went through some of
my notes from like january february and mass like we just discussed like normally whatever is pretty
hot in the space so in february i'm checking like we talked about deep seek r1 r1 because it came
out now it's pretty irrelevant because these models keep on updating
and becoming better but it's just like yeah whatever cool stuff is happening we're happy to
discuss yeah nice nice and look i mean i bet you guys got into some really great conversations
around uh ai gentic ai machine learning um and um learning models um have you guys ever broached the
subject of uh quantum computing or you guys touched onached the subject of quantum computing or have you
guys touched on that before? I don't remember. I don't think so. No. Okay, cool. All right. Well,
that's great. Exciting. Let's dive in, guys. So let's maybe start somewhere. Okay. I mean,
what do you guys know about quantum computing? It might be nothing and that's fine, but what do you
guys know about quantum computing? And have uh come across um anything related to quantum computing in the blockchain space
so what i normally hear is just the kind of fear-mongering like hey once quantum computing
is here all cryptography is broken obviously it's effects symmetric and asymmetric encryption so all
of the wallets that we have as soon soon as you know someone's public key,
good luck, the private key can be easily extracted.
But I honestly don't think like crypto
would ever be the first target.
I mean, all banking depends on the same cryptography.
So there's way bigger fish to fry
and way bigger kind of problems to solve with this.
But I mean, in crypto, I think it's more obvious
because people use addresses which
are hashes of the public key you need people are aware of like public private key cryptography so
here it's i think more easy to pitch this but yeah it's generally just nice yeah and no potential
what can we do with quantum computing no no look absolutely um and and that's a great starting
point because it's not just
blockchain that comes under threat it is everything and there's fear-mongering for people that can see
it coming uh they're like oh shit this is going to be this is going to be a game changer because
quantum computers coming to life brings a different type of threat to blockchain security and any
banking security at a fundamental level you know know, we talk about security layer, we talk about different types of blockchain having various types of security and
added security. But you know, this is a fundamental shift in security for all systems. So not just
blockchain, obviously blockchain is a target, just like you mentioned, but all systems, including
banking systems. So let's start at the top. I'll give you guys a bit of a rundown. I'm going to
try and explain to you what the difference is between quantum computers and traditional
computers, just at a basic level, just enough to understand, okay, well, what's going to be
the impact in the blockchain space? And also, where we can start is in terms of current blockchains
and how difficult it is to actually crack private keys for current blockchains.
So, you know, I'll ask questions from you guys, if it's okay, along the way.
Yes, please.
Yeah, yeah, cool.
Okay.
Just to see, you know, what you guys think, but also just, you know, curious to learn what you think.
Okay.
So, so current blockchains are built on something called ECDSA, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature
Algorithms, right?
That's, that's all blockchains are built on that, or ECC.
That's not important.
The important part is, okay, well, I mean, how secure is it?
So if you're using traditional computers,
it will take a long, long time to break the private key.
Do you guys want to take a guess as to how long it might take
in, you know, orders of magnitude, how long it might take?
Probably like 10,000 years.
10,000? What's your guess, Marco?
1,000.
1,000? Pretty good guesses, guys.
So it's much, much longer than that.
It would take billions of times
of the age of the universe.
And the age of the universe is 13.8 billion.
So if you were to write out the number,
it's 10 to the 38 years. So that's
It was a horrible guess. Come on.
So no, but it's interesting, you know, because 10,000 years is also, you know, very long.
It doesn't really matter. It's 1000 years, 10,000 years, it doesn't even matter. Even
if it's 100 years, it's like, okay, all right, no one's gonna crack it. But that's how security
is with traditional computers. And so breaking a public key is relatively easier. It would
only take a few billion years, right? So not 10 to the... Only a few billion. Yeah, right? So that's public keys,
but private keys, you know, it takes 10 to the 30. So now we've established that. So if you use
a powerful quantum computer, breaking private keys will take hours to days. That's the difference
between traditional computing and quantum computing.
So you can see that there's a massive shift.
It's not, you know, it's not one, two, three orders of magnitude.
It's just a completely different way of thinking about
how we need to think about security
and how we need to secure our systems.
And so I'll kind of go into a little bit more detail
about how quantum computers are totally
different to the computers we know today.
So classical computers, so the machines that you're using now, Mac, Windows, they use bits,
they use ones and zeros to process data sequentially, while quantum computers use qubits.
So qubits, which can be both one and a zero simultaneously. This is called superposition.
I know it's weird and it is weird.
It's literally at the limits of physics,
but that's the way it is.
So, you know, at the moment it's on or off
with computers that we have.
Quantum computers can be an infinite number
between one and zero and be one and zero at the same time,
which allows them to explore vast possibilities in parallel. So, so, you know, try
and kind of think of, get that into your head, like, how does
that even work where you've got a computer that's just processing
like gazillions of of transactions, well, not
transactions per second, but processes per second in a strange way.
But there is a limitation.
So these quantum computers,
they can't run programs and software like Windows,
like apps and things like that, that we use at the moment.
But they're astronomically good
at processing numbers and probabilities.
So you guys following or have I lost you at the qubits?
Oh, we're following, but I lost you at the qubits?
We're following, but I think I have a question, which is, is like a qubit, is it comparable to like a particle being in a quantum state and until it's observed, it's either like one or zero? Is that how it works on the qubit level? That's exactly right. But the qubit measurement doesn't work actually, you know,
on a particle basis.
There are different types of measurements,
but you've actually nailed it.
So it sounds like, you know,
you've heard of like the double slit experiment
and superposition.
So superposition of a particle, a subatomic particle,
means that until you observe it,
it doesn't take form or shape,
which is a very, very weird concept,
but that's what it is.
So it's like trading as cat.
You've probably heard of that.
You know, the cat's both dead and alive at the same time.
Well, that's exactly what quantum computers are about.
And so you're absolutely right
that it is, that's what represents
or not represents exactly a qubit,
but that's how a qubit is measured.
There's different measurements of qubits and there hasn't been an agreed way how qubits are measured, but that's how a qubit is measured. There's different measurements of qubits
and there hasn't been an agreed way how qubits are measured,
but that's how it's measured
and that's how you start to measure the power of quantum computers.
So, yeah, so does that answer your question?
Yes, yes, yes.
Please continue.
Yeah.
Okay, cool, cool.
I'm going to pause every now and then just to check in with you guys.
So look, going back to, okay, so these quantum computers,
they're really great at processing numbers and probabilities.
So what are they used for?
So they're used for things like drug discovery and development,
where you might be able to find a molecule that by millions and millions of trial and error,
but quantum computers can do that really efficiently and really quickly.
Again, something that might take thousands of years to try and model on an existing computer.
It might be able to do it in a couple of hours, drug discovery, genetics, things like that.
Then you've got something that we're familiar with is finance and optimizing financial systems.
So managing portfolios, risk, fraud, detecting fraud,
even market movements, predictions
in a totally different way compared to AI.
There's also material science, developing new super materials.
Again, using quantum computing, you can see what structures might be stable,
what materials could be useful at certain temperatures
or at certain conditions,
things like that. And then finally, this is the real exciting one, is AI and machine
learning, which is called quantum AI. So we haven't gotten there yet, but we will get
there. And when I say we will get there as a society. So this will be for things like
pattern recognition, faster training, and potentially ways to process information in completely novel ways.
You know, even with AI and intelligent models
that operate at the moment,
or languages that they kind of speak to each other,
or genetic AI that speak to each other,
we don't even know how they're speaking,
but they're more efficient than the languages
that we've taught them.
So if you then
add a quantum element to it, I mean, you know, it's hard to even imagine what that's going to be
like when you have quantum states and, you know, the ability of ones and zeros and all the
probabilities being able to be measured. And then you combine that with traditional computing and
AI, it's going to be some crazy stuff. And so this is, you know, this is not future science fiction, you know, 50, 100 years away,
guys.
This is, you know, quantum and AI is a few years away.
So, you know, a lot of people say 2030 is when singularity happens, when we get super
intelligent.
But quantum computers, within the next couple of years, there's a lot of predictions, you
know, from IBM that they'll be able to start hacking traditional systems.
So, look, these are great things and great use cases.
But unfortunately, there's one big use case for quantum computers that's not good.
And that's for cracking codes.
So cracking codes, passwords, encrypted keys, any blockchains, any bank accounts.
And this is the reason that all the big banks, you know, you might not hear about how much the banks are panicking because obviously they don't want to panic their customers, but they're all rushing to get quantum secure systems.
And now there's so when it comes to quantum secure systems, you know, we are obviously in the blockchain space.
So when it comes to quantum secure systems, you know, we are obviously in the blockchain space.
And so quantum secure blockchains are quite different to, let's say, quantum secure systems that secure existing traditional, let's say, banking and finance and APIs and things like that.
So that's quite different in ways that simpler.
And that's actually been around for a while where that security exists.
It's just about a matter of upgrading your systems and implementing that security.
So that's not difficult.
But quantum securing blockchains, it's a change at the fundamental level.
So to give you an idea, so today in December 2025, systems by companies like IBM and Atom
Computing have operating quantum
processes in the range of 1000 to 6000 qubits. I know that's a huge range. It
sounds weird, but it's also how you measure your qubits. But that's kind of
where we sit and different quantum computers can kind of do different
things. And, and it's still now coming out of from from laboratories, it's
coming out into actual use cases and modeling. So we're
at 6000 qubits. So you can do a lot with that. And they're getting faster and faster, very,
very quickly. So once we get to 10,000 qubits, we're screwed. That's that's basically it. We're
screwed if we don't if we don't take action. And so so this is where all that kind of, you know,
fear comes out of it all that fear mongering that you hear out there is that people who understand oh you know we're we're so close
to it and you know and we're at 6 000 a question here is like at what rate are we growing on an
annual basis in terms of like the the increase in like the amount of qubits like a computer one of these quantum computers can uh can have
yeah look uh you know previously we had moore's law right which means um uh processing power
like doubled every every couple of years and and now that law doesn't even apply because you know
with semiconductors getting to a certain level we've reached our physical limits so now it's
slowed down quantum computers been a little bit different. It's been a bit strange. There's no linear or exponential growth. I mean, generally all technology is exponential
growth, but you need breakthroughs in the way that the machine is built. So for a period of time,
there was not a lot of rate of growth. And then three, four years ago, there's been massive
growth and now it's just exponential.
Think about ChatGPT, right?
How it changed our society.
Like, it's like ever since even like 2005, 6, 7, 8, the 2010s, everyone's talking about
machine learning, AI this, AI that.
But it wasn't really.
And then ChatGPT comes out and blows everyone's minds and see what's happened.
It's already been integrated into all of our lives.
And, you know, even agentic AI, I personally believe agentic AI is going to have, you know,
be even faster and the way we adopt it and the way it's going to be utilized. So it's going to
be just like that. When once it comes about, it's just going to be everywhere. The use cases
are so huge that every major organization is going to be using it. And obviously blockchains
will have to protect against it. And in blockchains will have to protect against it.
And in fact, blockchains will start using it for node operations
and things like that as well.
So couldn't answer your question directly, Yannick,
because it hasn't been a linear growth,
but it's about three years ago,
we were at a couple of hundred qubits
and now we're sitting at 6,000 qubits.
So that might give you a bit of an idea of, you know, how fast it's growing.
The topic that always comes up with these is the differentiation between physical and logical qubits.
So which number are we talking about?
This is 6,000 logical ones?
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry, no, no.
These are physical.
These are physical.
Okay, okay.
But the logical one is the one that's actually relevant for breaking stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, so look, it's changing every day.
I can get the figures for you.
I'll look it up just in a second.
We're about to release a massive piece of research that we've been doing.
We're releasing that next Friday, actually.
And it's kind of the entire landscape of quantum computing like all
of the use cases all of the all of the progress progress over time exactly where we are in terms
of physical and logical qubits it's yeah it's a comprehensive I mean it's like 50 pages long
we've been spending quite a bit of time because not only are we building well we've already built
the quantum secure blockchain but we're going to be doing some really other exciting stuff with uh with quantum computing as well um as it becomes
a bit more available to us so um yeah so uh yannick you had a question as well you got your hands up
uh yeah so um So why is it easier for a quantum computer to crack like RSA or ECC or hashes or what have you?
Why is it like, because you just said that there's a bunch of things that quantum computers cannot do.
But why is it they're good at like cracking uh encryption yeah yeah okay great uh excellent
question look that that's going to take me to the next part and i'm going to explain post quantum
cryptography which is pqc so that's you know when people say pqc that's that's what it is post
quantum cryptography quantum safe um post quantum, whatever people refer
to that, it's technologies and systems that are capable of being protected against quantum
threats. So quantum computers are brilliant in solving math puzzles, which are puzzles just like
ECDSA and how blockchains work. So they're really, really good at that and really good at
probabilistic stuff. So numbers stuff, but they're not good at work. So they're really, really good at that and really good at probabilistic stuff.
So numbers stuff, but they're not good at programming.
So traditional computers, they can do a bit of numbers,
bit of programming, a bit of everything,
but they're going to be nowhere near
the billions of years difference
in terms of being able to crunch numbers.
So the simplest way to put it is that these qubits,
these superposition states can just crunch numbers like nothing else, like at the limits of physics.
If that answers your question.
Yeah, yeah, got it.
Yeah, cool.
Okay.
So that's what quantum computers are brilliant at doing, but they're not good at reversing a secure hash function.
And so let me explain this a little bit more.
So let's talk about, okay,
what types of quantum security exists
in the blockchain space?
And we've dived into this really deeply.
Curanium was founded two years ago.
And by the way, plug for Curanium.
If anyone's not following,
follow Curanium underscore org,
and we'll be releasing our paper on quantum secure systems.
And then plus we're making some major announcements as well.
But Curanium was started two years ago to solve this particular reason.
You know, very early in the game, you know, Kapil, the founder,
he, co-founder actually he uh went out and started
talking to people it's okay look you know this this is this is what i'm looking to secure this
this this big threat coming um and uh you know what do you think well you know talk to investors
talk to people out there talk to you know over 100 people and most people said okay look this is this
is not important you know it's too far away. No one cares. I don't really
understand it, things like that. And then I had the same conversation about a year ago,
and 60, 70% of those people said, okay, all right, this is a really interesting thing. This is
really important. And so it's already shifted. Even a year ago, no one was talking about it.
Only recently, Vitalik started talking about it, no one was talking about it. Only recently, you know, Vitalik started talking about it and others started talking about it and Bitcoin community started talking about it.
And it's taken light. And that's because they don't have time to really secure against this.
It's going to take a few years to secure other chains and some chains, it might be too late for them.
And also some chains, as they're trying to become quantum secure, there's going to be massive disruptions.
You know, they might have to do a hard fork
or just might not be possible and it might be too late.
So, yeah, I'm just going to pause there for a second.
Marco, you have a question?
Yeah, I think you kind of touched upon it now.
I'm very curious, like, if you need a new chain for this
and why it's not possible to suddenly change
the cryptocurrency scheme by a
hard fork or whatever to then only have quantum secure cryptography for new wallet generation
etc and you just kind of phase out all the existing ones obviously you cannot change
the past so everything that has been encrypted so far will be broken I think that happens with
anything that's out there today.
Anyways, people are already harvesting this and just waiting for quantum to be ready.
But why can you not kind of suddenly change Ethereum?
Because otherwise, Ethereum would be doomed in the next five years, from what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so, in fact, ECDSA systems by the National Institute of Standards, they are phasing out ECDSA chains to being part of the standards.
And they're saying that they've all got updates.
So, look, it's not that Ethereum is not possible to upgrade Ethereum.
So it is.
It is absolutely possible.
absolutely possible, but it's not going to be easy and it's going to be messy.
But it's not going to be easy.
And it's going to be messy.
And it's going to take a lot of time to think through exactly how that works
and how it's going to affect signatures and then how it actually affects
other projects that are actually built on existing signatures and systems.
So it's not going to be
it's not going to be an easy ride.
That's one. The second thing is also wallets, the way wallets operate. Obviously,
wallets can actually sign transactions, but even wallets may potentially be hackable.
So it's almost like, how do I put it? So let's say a bank's database being hacked. That's,
let's say, a chain being hacked hacked versus let's say the point where
someone actually logs into their internet banking um you know that being hacked uh or something on
on someone's mobile device so you know if you kind of it's not the best analogy but it's an analogy
of your wallet also needing quantum security and i'll go through the different types of
uh quantum security but marco you touched on a really important point that I'll
quickly touch on before I go to you, Yannick. You've got your hands raised. So Marco, you talked
about harvesting now. I'll explain that for the audience. What does that mean? So there's a system
called store now, decrypt later. So harvest now, decrypt later. What that means is that hackers that
are able to get their hands on quantum systems and they know that this processing power is coming where they can start cracking keys. They are going to they're
storing people's keys. They're harvesting all the data that you can. They're going to you know,
banking systems and getting whatever encrypted data that they can collect that they know that
later on they can actually decrypt this data and get access to funds, information, knowledge, whatever it is.
So that's happening now.
That's already happening.
And, you know, especially on Bitcoin or even, you know, on the chain that you're at, it's, you know, if you've got a big balance, it's likely that someone's probably, you know, harvesting that data right now.
Yeah.
So Yannick, you had a question?
Is there anything actionable for users?
Because I read about this and i was like
yeah i'm pretty fucked like there's nothing i can adjust today i can't erase stuff that's already
out there so is there some housekeeping users can do stuff like i don't know use fresh wallets all
the time or is it just senseless yeah look i mean you know using fresh wallets is not really going
to help help that much because if they're harvesting your data, it's all on chain, right?
They can trace, you know, where that went.
So, you know, it might hinder, you know, hackers by about an hour or so, but that's about it.
So my understanding was, so a public address is not the public key, right?
So it's not that trivial as far as I know, but it could be very wrong.
Yeah, no, it's not trivial, but it's possible.
It's not hard to do.
So, you know, there's a way to actually trace
private keys as well.
I was looking at something the other day
that I was being shown,
and I'm not going to explain this 100% clearly,
but the way that initial,
like the early Bitcoin keys were developed, you can actually see a pattern in the way that those keys were generated and what those private keys look like versus what the public key looks like as well.
So there's actually some sort of relationship there, which hackers have been tracing.
This is not for all Bitcoin wallets.
This is for a very early stage portion of Bitcoin wallets.
And a lot of them actually hold pretty big balances. So those ones, you can trace. And there are many other methods.
So let me go in and explain the different types of... Well, actually, Yelik, to answer
your question. So what can you do? And that's the question that we were stuck at. And that's
the problem that we've been
trying to solve at Curanium. And we have solved it because we've built the world's first stateless
hash-based blockchain. Not only that, we've actually secured the wallet. So the problem is
that if you're going to secure a chain with quantum security, means that you actually have to have
different signature schemes and you need a wallet as well that does that so so anything on the curanium chain will be
quantum secure anything off the curanium chain will not be quantum
secure it's it's like that okay can you can you can you explain let's track back
a little bit because yeah can you can you explain in very simple terms, it's like, what does it require for a chain to be
quantum resistant, right? That's how we say it. Like in very simple terms, like,
do we change the encryption algorithm? And why is that new algorithm more, let's say, more
less probable to be broken? is it is it more computational intensive
is it like like how does it work yeah yeah excellent question excellent question so i'm
going to answer this as best as possible and this is where we're getting to the actual bleeding edge
and the cutting edge of technology okay so there are three main families of post-quantum cryptography
being adapted for blockchains.
So one is lattice-based.
I'm going to come back to each one of these.
One is lattice-based, two is hash-based,
and three is code-based.
So lattice-based, I'm going to explain
as simply as I can.
So lattice-based is module lattice-based
key encapsulation mechanism, which is MLKM.
So with this, the way it works is that the security yeah okay
yeah yeah that's uh i honestly like i've actually got this written down because i knew i was not
going to be able to pronounce it um slhdsa you know i'll explain what that means but
so it's a module letter space is a type of security that's based on extreme difficulty of finding the
shortest or closest vector in a complex and high dimensional geometric structure called a lattice.
So if you kind of visualize a three-dimensional geometric structure or even more than three
dimensions, which is hard for us to even visualize or even think of, but it's all mathematical. And so this geometric structure will have a pathway.
