Algorand has emerged as an early standout in the crypto market’s latest quantum security debate, after a recent Google Quantum AI paper highlighted the blockchain as a living example of post-quantum cryptography deployed on a network.
The attention came as the article heightened concerns around Bitcoin and Ethereum, two networks whose size, age and design choices could make any future migration to quantum-resistant infrastructure slower and more complicated.
Against that backdrop, Algorand’s quieter work on Falcon digital signatures, government receipts, and key rotation suddenly looked less like a niche technical experiment and more like a practical advance.
The shift in attention helped Algorand’s token rise sharply last week, with traders treating the Google paper as validation of work already underway on the network.
According to Crypto Slates data is ALGO, the native token of the blockchain network, one of the top performers of the past week, gaining around 50% to rise to $0.12 at the time of writing. Notably, the price development occurred less than a week after the token fell to an all-time low of $0.08.
Algorand’s silent quantum computing has an edge over Bitcoin and Ethereum
Algorand’s advantage over Bitcoin and Ethereum is smaller than recent enthusiasm suggests, but it is also more concrete than what many larger chains can currently show.
In his paperGoogle described Algorand as an example of real-world deployment of post-quantum cryptography on an otherwise quantum-vulnerable blockchain.
The distinction was important. It didn’t say that Algorand had solved the problem end-to-end, but it did indicate a network that had moved from theory to live implementation.
Algorand’s core consensus and built-in transactions still rely on Ed25519, which remains vulnerable in a sufficiently advanced quantum scenario.
However, the network has already deployed Falcon digital signatures for smart transactions and government certificates, the cryptographic attestations used to verify blockchain status in chains. It has also made Falcon Authentication available as a primitive for developers building on the Algorand Virtual Machine, giving the ecosystem a working set of tools rather than just a roadmap.
The network conducted its first post-quantum secure transaction in 2025, a milestone that set it apart from much larger rivals that are still debating design paths, governance trade-offs and implementation timelines.
Algorand also allows users to rotate the private keys associated with their accounts, a feature that doesn’t eliminate the underlying threat but could make future migrations more manageable.
That combination, live transaction capability, developer tools, state-proof support and native key rotation, is what made Algorand a focal point as the article circulated through the market.
In an industry where many conversations about quantum risks remain theoretical, Algorand could point to infrastructure already in production.
Bitcoin and Ethereum face quantum computing risks
For Bitcoin, the concern is not just whether quantum computers will eventually be able to extract private keys from public information, but also how much of the network’s legacy will be difficult to migrate over time.
The paper said a quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could crack the elliptic curve cryptography that protects Bitcoin wallets, a much lower threshold than previous estimates that were in the millions.
Google’s own most advanced chip, Willow, remains well below that level, but the revised estimate has intensified scrutiny into how much Bitcoin could be exposed if the technology develops faster than expected.
The burden is particularly acute because some of Bitcoin’s oldest addresses keep public keys visible on the chain.
The newspaper cited an estimated 6.7 million BTC in older Pay-to-Public-Key addresses, including coins long associated with Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Even beyond these legacy portfolios, the migration challenge is politically and technically tough for a network that prioritizes backward compatibility and takes a cautious approach to base layer changes.
Quantum risk in the case of Bitcoin is both a governance and coordination problem and a cryptographic problem.
Meanwhile, Ethereum’s exposure to the same quantum computing risk is slightly broader.
Once an Ethereum user sends a transaction, the public key associated with that account becomes permanently visible on the chain. The paper said this leaves the top 1,000 Ethereum wallets, holding approximately 20.5 million ETH, exposed to a sufficiently sophisticated quantum attack.
It also identified at least 70 large contracts with admin keys visible on-chain, which ultimately control much more than the ETH they directly own, including stablecoin minting authority and other system-critical permissions.
Furthermore, the attack surface extends beyond wallets and contract administrators.
Ethereum’s proof-of-stake validator set, its large Layer 2 networks, and parts of its data availability architecture all rely on cryptographic components that the article describes as vulnerable.
According to the article, approximately 37 million ETH has been staked, and much of Ethereum’s transaction burden now runs through rollups and bridges that inherit assumptions from the base layer.
That means any serious post-quantum migration would have to reach not only users and validators, but also the network of applications and scaling systems built around them.