The Year Quantum Computing Stopped Being Background Noise - Decrypt

In brief Caltech, Google, and IBM delivered results that reshaped expectations for practical quantum systems. Bitcoin developers reassessed long-term security as quantum timelines grew less speculative. Researchers said the threat remains distant, but 2025 showed a clearer view of the next decade. When scientists at Caltech flicked on their new neutral-atom quantum array in September, the quantum machine broke a threshold many scientists thought was years away. For the first time, researchers successfully trapped 6,100 atomic qubits in a single system and maintained coherence in a way that pushed quantum hardware past the “toy demo” stage. What happened in that lab meant large-scale, error-corrected quantum hardware is no longer a distant aspiration but a credible possibility. And for digital currencies like Bitcoin, whose security depends on cryptography assumed safe for decades, it signals that the quietly accelerating threat posed by quantum computers is now edging into view. The threat is not imminent-but the window for adaptation is finite. That’s why, at Emerge, we consider quantum computing’s advance-and crypto’s lack of readiness-our Tech Trend of the Year. “We can now see a pathway to large error-corrected quantum computers. The building blocks are in place,” principal investigator Manuel Endres said in a statement. For years, the standard comfort for cryptographers has been that quantum computers remained too noisy, too fragile, and too immature to matter to crypto. In 2025, that stance weakened. Roadmaps tightened. Error-correction improved. And several labs produced results that made fault-tolerant machines feel like a question of when, not if. What changed in the labs So-called “neutral-atom systems” use electrically neutral atoms as qubits, trapping single atoms in fixed positions with lasers so each one can store and manipulate quantum information. “Coherence” measures how long those qubits remain in a usable quantum state before noise destroys it. Both became central in 2025 as the field shifted from lab demonstrations to architectures designed to scale. Understanding the gains of 2025 requires understanding what has held quantum systems back. Qubits (quantum bits) lose their quantum state easily, and scaling them often amplifies that instability. This year, several systems behaved differently. Google, IBM, and Caltech each reported advances in 2025 that narrowed the timeline for fault-tolerant quantum machines. Google’s 105-qubit Willow processor showed steep error-rate reductions as it scaled, and in October, the company said its Quantum Echoes benchmark ran roughly 13,000 times faster than leading supercomputers. The results indicated that stable logical qubits might be achievable with far fewer physical qubits than the thousand-to-one ratios long assumed. IBM advanced the picture from another angle. Its “Cat” family processors demonstrated 120-qubit entanglement and extended coherence, and its Starling roadmap, released in June, targeted 200 error-corrected qubits by 2029 with support for 100 million quantum gates. A separate effort with AMD showed that standard FPGA hardware could run error-correction logic ten times faster than required, bringing real-time correction closer to practical use. Caltech added scale in September through what researchers described as the world’s largest neutral-atom system, trapping 6,100 cesium atoms as qubits,...

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