Bitcoin Q-Day on the horizon? IBM’s new Quantum chip expected to reach another milestone

IBM on Wednesday laid out the next steps in its roadmap for practical quantum computing, unveiling improved processors, software and manufacturing methods that it said will help propel the field toward a verified quantum advantage by 2026 and milestones on the path to fault tolerance by 2029.

The “quantum advantage” refers to the point at which a quantum computer performs a task that no traditional computer can match. Fault tolerance is the ability of a quantum computer to keep its performance stable in the face of errors. If IBM’s roadmap holds, then IBM’s Nighthawk processor would mark a crucial step toward a commercially viable quantum computer by the end of the decade.

While IBM’s announcement brings quantum computing one step closer to “Q-Day,” the new processors are still far from being a threat to the encryption that protects Bitcoin.

Cracking Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography would require a fault-tolerant quantum computer with approximately 2,000 logical qubits, which is equivalent to tens of millions of physical qubits once error correction is taken into account. The Quantum Nighthawk is a 120-qubit processor designed to handle more complex calculations while maintaining low error rates.

Still, Q Day is getting closer. The first Nighthawk systems are expected to reach users in late 2025, and future iterations are expected to exceed 1,000 connected qubits by 2028. The chip connects each qubit through 218 tunable couplers, about 20% more than IBM’s previous Heron design in 2023. IBM said the new architecture enables approximately 30% more complex circuits and supports calculations of up to 5000 two-qubit gates.

Nighthawk is the next roadpoint in IBM’s Starling roadmap, a series of steps announced in July to deliver a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer (IBM Quantum Starling) by 2029. Achieving the goal of manufacturing a scalable quantum computer for industrial use requires significant advances in modular architecture and error correction, among other advances anticipated in the construction of Starling.

IBM’s announcement came after a wave of renewed investment in quantum computing. In October, Google said its Willow processor achieved verified quantum acceleration, completing a physics simulation faster than any known classical supercomputer. This result renewed fears about the long-term security of Bitcoin encryption.

To support its quantum ambitions, IBM partnered with Algorithmiq, the Flatiron Institute and BlueQubit to launch quantum advantage tracker, an open source platform for comparing quantum and classical results in benchmark experiments.

IBM also announced that it is expanding its Qiskit software to adapt to the new hardware. The company said the dynamic circuits in Qiskit improved accuracy by 24% at the 100-qubit scale. A new C-API interface links Qiskit with classic high-performance systems to accelerate error mitigation, reducing the cost of extracting accurate results, IBM claims, by more than 100 times.

By 2027, IBM plans to add computational libraries for machine learning and optimization to help researchers model physical and chemical systems.

Building towards fault tolerance

IBM also announced progress on its experimental Quantum Loon processor, which the company said demonstrates all the key hardware components needed for fault-tolerant quantum computing. The chip’s architecture is based on technologies already proven in other test systems, including long-range “c-couplers” that link distant qubits and the ability to reset qubits between operations.

The company reported a tenfold acceleration in error decoding performance, achieving real-time correction in less than 480 nanoseconds using qLDPC codes, a milestone it said came a year ahead of schedule.

To accelerate development, IBM moved production of its quantum chips to a 300-millimeter wafer line at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York. The transition, he said, has doubled the speed of research, increased chip complexity tenfold, and allowed multiple processor designs to be developed and explored in parallel.

IBM said the updates mark continued progress toward scalable, fault-tolerant quantum systems and provide the foundation for community-verified demonstrations of quantum advantages in the coming years.

“We believe IBM is the only company positioned to rapidly invent and scale software, hardware, manufacturing and quantum error correction to unlock transformative applications,” IBM research director Jay Gambetta said in a statement.