The US Treasury Department said it has created a Quantum-Readiness Task Force to support an orderly transition by the American financial sector toward quantum-secure technologies and post-quantum cryptography, or PQC. The group is set up as a public-private collaboration, bringing together government agencies, financial institutions, financial market infrastructures, technology providers, and other private-sector participants. According to the announcement, the task force will focus on three areas: coordination across the financial industry and PQC migration, readiness among third parties and vendors, and risks tied to digital assets and other emerging technologies. The Treasury said the initiative is based on Executive Order 14412 issued earlier by the Trump administration and also draws on the G7 Cyber Expert Group roadmap for the transition to post-quantum cryptography.

ChainFeeds Research’s latest PRO edition surveys a wide stretch of crypto protocol work, led by Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade priorities and a new analysis of Block-Level Access List, or BAL, pricing under EIP-7999. Ethlabs argues Hegotá should stay focused on a small set of issues tied to Ethereum’s long-term competitiveness, placing FOCIL and Quick Slots at the top of the list while also backing native account abstraction through EIP-8141 Frame Transactions and a more careful approach to scaling via resource pricing and propagation improvements rather than simply raising the gas limit. The issue also tracks Bitcoin protocol discussions. It highlights sipa’s proposal for handling larger post-quantum cryptography witness data without introducing another transaction identifier, a disclosed reorg attack risk affecting LND versions before 0.20.0, and a proposal by Jean Pablo to formalize the rawtr() output script descriptor in a BIP. On the research side, Fei Wu uses data from February through May 2026 to argue BAL should be priced as a byproduct of execution and state access instead of as a standalone resource. Other featured work includes Ethereum PoS head-vote timing research, a zero-bridge cross-chain exchange design called BTCP, a roundup from The MEV Letter #150, and a machine-learning paper on early detection of fraudulent memecoins on Solana.

A new survey from the Global Risk Institute puts the odds of a quantum computer breaking today’s encryption at 28% to 49% within 10 years, rising to 51% to 70% within 15 years. Speaking at the 11th WHATs NEXT Quantum Technology Summit, XREX co-founder and group CEO Wayne Huang said that risk is more acute for the broader financial system than for cryptocurrencies. His argument was straightforward: banks and other regulated institutions can migrate on a regulator-led timetable, while Bitcoin has no central authority that can order a network-wide upgrade. Huang said the core problem is not simply whether quantum machines can break current cryptography today, but how long a full migration would take once institutions decide to move. In banking, that means reviewing account authentication, transaction signing, data transmission, and integrations with outside vendors, then testing and switching systems in phases. The article also points to “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” attacks, in which encrypted data is collected now and cracked once quantum capabilities mature. The report also notes that Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission issued a reference guide for post-quantum cryptography migration in June 2026, while the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has already released post-quantum cryptography standards. Huang said Bitcoin faces a different hurdle: any quantum-resistance upgrade would depend on community consensus among miners, nodes, developers, exchanges, and users.

Anthropic said an unreleased version of its Claude Mythos model uncovered two previously unknown cryptographic attacks, including one against HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme now in the third round of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s competition. According to the company, Claude identified a symmetry in HAWK’s structure that cuts the cost of recovering a secret key in the smallest configuration from 2^64 operations to 2^38, a roughly 67 million-fold reduction. Anthropic said fixing the issue would require roughly doubling HAWK’s key size, which would undercut the compactness and speed that make the scheme attractive for blockchains and other systems sensitive to signature size. The company also described a separate result on a 7-round research version of AES-128, where Claude was asked to avoid all five established families of AES cryptanalysis and invent a new approach. Anthropic said the model eventually produced a technique called “Möbius Bridge,” reducing one of the nine key bytes an attacker previously needed to guess. It also reported that Claude broke 13 rounds of LEA, though deployed LEA uses 24 rounds. Anthropic said it disclosed the findings to the algorithms’ authors and relevant U.S. government and industry partners before publication, and coordinated the HAWK finding with NIST.

Google reports quantum computing advances could break elliptic curve cryptography used by Bitcoin with fewer than 500,000 qubits. Urges crypto industry to adopt post-quantum cryptography by 2029, partnering with Coinbase and Ethereum Foundation.

BOLTS Technologies launches a pilot on Canton Network to integrate quantum-resilient technology (QFlex), protecting over $6 trillion in real-world assets from potential Q-Day threats.

BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust now holds about 764,893 BTC (3.64% of total supply). A 'harvest now, decrypt later' attack strategy targets blockchain data for future quantum decryption. BMIC project launches a quantum-secure wallet and staking solution based on ERC-4337.

Google Quantum AI's new whitepaper says breaking Bitcoin only needs 1,200 logical qubits—20x lower than prior estimates—with quantum hardware expected by 2033. The real crisis is not physics but Bitcoin's conservative governance, as anti-quantum upgrades would halve throughput and triple fees, with consensus potentially taking a decade.