Earlier this year we published our Prepare for Q-Day page: a plain-English explanation of the day a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break the encryption that protects nearly everything — bank transfers, medical records, contracts, email, the VPN tunnel your remote team uses every morning. We said serious estimates clustered in the 2030s, and that the real danger was "harvest now, decrypt later."
This week produced enough news that the page deserves an update. Three threads, one conclusion.
Thread one: the race to 100
A Bloomberg Opinion piece this week framed the entire quantum industry around a single number: 100 error-corrected qubits. Here's why that number matters, in about 90 seconds.
Classical computers store information as bits: a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can hold both values at once and explore many possible states simultaneously. That's the source of their enormous theoretical power. The catch is that qubits are absurdly fragile — vibration, heat, even a passing cosmic ray can knock one out of its quantum state and corrupt the math. The fix is the logical qubit: a redundant bundle of physical qubits engineered to catch and cancel errors before they spread. At roughly 100 reliable logical qubits, most researchers agree quantum machines stop being lab curiosities and start solving problems classical computers can't.
So where are we?
• Quantinuum's Helios system has produced 48 logical qubits from just 98 physical ones — a 2:1 overhead against a prior best of up to 100:1. The company is targeting around 100 logical qubits in 2027 and hundreds by 2029.
• On July 30, IBM and the University of Chicago encoded 70 logical qubits with a new error-correction method and cracked a classically intractable problem in about 15 minutes, with effective error rates 10x lower than the underlying hardware. IBM's research director called it "firmly in the quantum advantage era."
• Infleqtion expects more than 50 logical qubits from its latest design next year, with its CTO describing 100 as "the point at which you start to be able to solve important problems... that classical computers cannot solve."
• In May, the Department of Commerce announced $2 billion in CHIPS Act incentives across nine quantum companies and two quantum foundries — a deliberate bet on multiple hardware approaches at once, because nobody yet knows which one wins.
The honest summary: 100 is close, and the money and the physics are both pointed the same direction.
Thread two: the energy problem might have a solution
Quieter, and further out, but worth knowing about. Scientists at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, unveiled what they describe as the first working quantum battery prototype — a device that, through a phenomenon called superabsorption, charges faster the larger it gets. It operates at room temperature and charges in femtoseconds. It also currently stores a tiny amount of energy for only nanoseconds, so skepticism is warranted and commercial use is years away if it comes at all. But energy and cryogenic cooling are two of the real bottlenecks on scaling quantum hardware, and this is the kind of side-door breakthrough that can quietly change a timeline.
Thread three: the Treasury stopped waiting
This is the one that should get your attention. On August 24, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a Quantum-Readiness Task Force — a public-private effort to move the entire financial sector to quantum-safe cryptography, citing Executive Order 14412 on protecting critical infrastructure. Secretary Bessent put it simply: "America must lead in securing the technologies that power our economy."
The line that matters most came from Treasury's Assistant Secretary Luke Pettit: "Post-quantum cryptography readiness is no longer a future-proofing exercise — it is a present-day risk control."
Read that again. The people responsible for the plumbing of the financial system are no longer treating quantum as a someday problem. They're managing it now. And notice the task force's three workstreams: sector-wide transition, third-party and vendor readiness, and digital-asset risk. That middle one flows downhill. Once banks and payment processors have to certify that their vendors are quantum-safe, every business that touches them — the construction firm with a line of credit, the clinic that takes card payments, the school district running payroll through a bank portal — inherits the question.
Why this reaches your business, wherever you are and whatever your size
This isn't a Wall Street problem or a big-company problem. Encryption is the same math everywhere: the same RSA and elliptic-curve algorithms protect a two-person accounting firm's cloud backups and a multinational's wire transfers. A quantum computer capable of breaking one breaks all of them. And "harvest now, decrypt later" means that data being intercepted and stored today — health records with decade-long confidentiality obligations, legal and HR archives, designs, formulas, bids, pricing — gets opened the day the machine arrives, not a moment later.
The organizations at risk are the ones that will still care about their secrets in ten years. That's most of you.
Measure twice: what to do now
The good news is that the remedy is known. NIST finalized post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, and quantum-resistant options are already appearing in browsers, operating systems, VPN platforms, and security appliances. Our Q-Day readiness plan still holds, and this week's news only raises its priority:
1. Inventory where you use cryptography — VPNs, certificates, email, backups, SaaS integrations. You can't migrate what you haven't measured.
2. Classify data by confidentiality shelf-life. Anything that must stay secret past 2035 is already exposed to harvest-now-decrypt-later.
3. Ask every vendor for a post-quantum roadmap. The Treasury is about to ask the banks; you should be asking your cloud, security, and software providers the same thing.
4. Buy crypto-agile. Favor platforms that can swap algorithms without a forklift replacement. This is one of the reasons we lean on partners like Check Point and AWS, who have published quantum-safe roadmaps.
5. Get the fundamentals right. MFA, patching, tested backups. Q-Day doesn't excuse you from Tuesday's ransomware.
6. Put it on a schedule. Crypto-agility is a managed-security discipline, not a one-time project.
Our take
A good tailor doesn't panic when the fashion changes; he takes measurements early so the alterations are small. That's what this moment calls for. The machine isn't here yet. The Treasury just told the country to start fitting for it anyway. If your organization can't currently answer "where do we use encryption, what has to stay secret for a decade, and which of our vendors has a quantum plan," that's the conversation to have before the headline — not after. Start a crypto-readiness conversation →
And if you'd rather hear this with lunch in front of you, Q-Day is on the agenda for our fall lunch-and-learn series. Get on the invite list →
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Open Source Tailors has delivered honest, vendor-neutral IT guidance since 2005 — managed security, cloud, and governed workplace AI for organizations of every size, wherever they operate. If you'd rather have this handled than explained, we're one conversation away: talk to a real person