Niccolo De Masi Warns Q Day May Arrive Within Years
Niccolo De Masi says q day may arrive within a few years, narrowing the window for organizations that still rely on RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography. He leads IonQ as chairman and CEO. The warning is now less about theory and more about which systems need to move first.
IonQ and Q Day
At the World Economic Forum in January, De Masi said, “People assume the Q-day was happening in 2040,” and “I think it is going to arrive like a freight train by the end of the current US administration.”
That is a sharper timeline than many companies are planning around. It pushes security teams to treat quantum readiness as a near-term migration problem, not a distant research topic.
RSA, ECC, and PQC
Palo Alto Networks said q day will not cause the internet to collapse. It also said RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography could become vulnerable on q day. Public key infrastructures, certificate authorities and digital identities would need to be replaced immediately to protect systems and data.
The practical implication is straightforward for organizations that authenticate users, issue certificates or move sensitive data across systems. Those controls sit in the middle of daily operations, so the first failures would likely show up in identity and trust layers before anything else.
2029 to 2035 Targets
IBM plans to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre are targeting complete PQC migration by 2035.
Those targets show the gap between building quantum hardware and replacing the cryptography already deployed across government and industry. They also leave little slack for organizations that have not started inventorying where RSA and ECC still protect systems, certificates and data flows.
100,000 Qubits and the Deadline
In February, Iceberg Quantum published a paper on arXiv.org saying about 100,000 qubits could break RSA encryption within a week. Earlier studies put the number at 20 million qubits. In March, Google Quantum AI said 500,000 physical qubits could defeat cryptocurrency-related cryptography within minutes.
The spread between 100,000 qubits and 20 million qubits shows how unsettled the field still is. Even so, the estimates point in the same direction, and the next public checkpoint is the 2026 Cyber Summit on May 21, where experts from government, industry and academia will discuss quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography.
