Cryptography

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the Quantum Computing Question

On March 30, 2026, a joint paper from Google Quantum AI, the Ethereum Foundation, and Stanford shook up the crypto community. It estimated that the physical qubit count needed to recover a private key on secp256k1 (the elliptic curve behind Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures) had dropped nearly 20x from the previous best estimate. A threat that used to sound like “millions of qubits, decades away” now reads as “under 500,000, maybe within this decade.”

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Pulling Encryption Keys Out of Passkeys with the WebAuthn PRF Extension

Passkeys show up on login screens everywhere now. What’s less well known is that the same authenticator holding your passkey can also hand out key material for encryption, not just authentication. The prf extension in WebAuthn is that path. This post covers what PRF actually returns, how it relates to the CTAP2 hmac-secret extension, what you still have to build yourself before it’s usable for real encryption, and where device and platform support stand as of 2026.

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