Quantum Computers. Midnight, and DARPA's QBI

Always rough, always rugged, sometimes Wyoming. Up here at the clinic, and it’s a lovely Saturday. It is November 8th, 2025. I wanted to make a video to talk about something that everybody's discussing because finally, we have an objective source of truth. You will see across the internet and the media, and you'll see across the markets, everybody talking about quantum computing.

They say, "Oh, when quantum computers come, they're going to destroy us. They're going to burn humanity down," or "Quantum computers will create a utopia." Quantum computers are going to do all kinds of interesting things, or they're complete scams and they don't exist and they never will exist. Our good friends at DARPA decided to actually definitively answer this question once and for all. The way they're going to answer this question is through a program called DARPA QBI.

I really wish they would do this for the blockchain space. I've been lobbying very heavily through every channel we have. This is something that's really special, and I wanted to share it all with you because it's a way to create objective reality with things. As of November 6, 2025, DARPA has selected 11 companies to enter the second stage, Stage B, of the QBI initiative, which aims to rigorously verify and validate whether any quantum computing approach can achieve utility-scale operation, meaning its computational value exceeds its cost by the year 2033. So, less than 10 years from now—about eight years.

As QBI continues, DARPA anticipates additional teams to advance to stages A, B, and C. Companies have entered the valuation process on varying timelines, resulting in staggered advancement. During the six-month Stage A, let's go down to what these stages are. Stage A describes a utility-scale quantum computing concept that has a plausible plan for realization in the near term. Basically, if you are a quantum computer builder, you come to DARPA, you spend six months answering every question they can throw at you, and they really put you through the wringer.

At the end of it, they say, "Actually, there's some merit. There's some value. What you're building could work and could solve real problems." Then you advance to Stage B, which is a rigorous one-year plan. Stage B describes a research and development plan capable of realizing the utility-scale quantum computer, the risks associated with that plan, and the mitigation steps and prototypes needed to address these risks.

They’re getting into the meat and potatoes. You've opened the kimono, and they're taking a look at your quantum computing design to figure out if it’s going to work or not. Stage C is working with the government to verify and validate that the utility-scale quantum computer concept can be constructed as designed and operated as intended. They’re actually going to watch you run it and test it with objective problems to verify if it works. I have some videos I'm going to show you guys.

Let me see if we can get this running and make sure the audio is working real quickly. So, I'm going to stop sharing, and this is the program manager of the DARPA program. >> "Of the ten smartest physicists that I know, I would say half of them are convinced that quantum computing is going to be the best thing since sliced bread. This is going to be the technology of the 21st century. The other half are convinced that even if you could build a quantum computer, which you definitely won’t be able to do, it’s never going to be more useful than your laptop is for anything that matters.

There’s a huge gap there between the most useful technology ever and totally useless. A lot of the work we’ve been doing over the last few years has started to convince me that maybe, just maybe, there is a path to make really useful quantum computers in the near future. To figure out if that’s true or not, DARPA wants to answer two really fundamental questions. The first question is, if I had a really powerful quantum computer, what could I do with it? And how transformative would that be?

The second is, is there a commercial company or an academic group, or really any group, that has a path to really build that kind of machine in the near term, in the next 10 years? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, that’s really an earthquake in how we understand the technology advancement path. If it’s really possible to build one of these and it really could be transformative, that has profound implications for policy. If it turns out, as a lot of us suspect, that that’s really not possible and it really won’t do something useful or there isn’t a path, we need to know that too so we can better plan our basic research funding going forward. So DARPA is launching something called the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

This is a major new government program that DARPA is spearheading to try to do exactly that. It is really hard to evaluate a top-flight quantum computing company and to see if their approach really holds water, if they can really make it the distance to build an industrially useful machine in the near term. But we are going to build that world-class verification and validation team. We really want to invite all comers, U.S.

and foreign companies, to come. If you think you have what it takes to get through our extraordinary verification and validation team, we would really like to hear from you. Is the hype real? Is quantum computing going to change everything? Or is this really overblown?

This is more of a basic science question that isn’t going to come to fruition until 2050 or 2060. That’s an incredibly important question for the United States to answer, and at DARPA, we believe that we can answer that question." What Joe is talking about as the program manager is that DARPA was tasked by the U.S. government to actually separate fact from fiction about quantum computers.

Are they real? Do they work? What can you actually do with them? What can’t you do with them? There’s a lot of marketing speak.

They set up the most rigorous program in history across any government to verify this. Right now, we have 11 companies that have survived the first stage of this process. They went through a brutally rigorous six-month process, and now they’re in Stage B. Stage B is one year long, and it’s going to determine whether they actually think they have something real or not. Stage C is the verification that they can actually solve the problems they said they would solve.

Here’s a list of the 11 companies. Some are in my backyard, and some are global. What’s really cool about quantum computing is there’s no canonical approach for it. In fact, I’m going to show you another thing real quickly. There are already five different approaches they’re taking, with sub-approaches in each.

You have atom computing in Boulder, Colorado; IBM; INQ; Nord; Quantique; Photonic; Quantinium; quantum motion; QA computing; silicon quantum computing; and Xanadu. I asked, "Can you give me a beginner’s guide to explain the different approaches that people are using?" For example, Atom is using a neutral atom approach. Highly focused lasers known as optical tweezers are used to grab individual atoms and arrange them in precise one-, two-, and even three-dimensional arrays inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber. That’s pretty crazy.

You have silicon-based approaches, where you make normal chips but with some very specialized properties. You have superconducting approaches, which IBM and Google are doing, as well as Rejetti, Nord, Quantique, and others. Then there are trapped ion approaches, which use individually charged atoms as qubits suspended in vacuum by electromagnetic fields. They even have light-based approaches; that’s what Xanadu is doing. Photonic quantum computers guide light through tiny pathways, waveguides etched as specialized chips, and quantum information is encoded in the properties of photons, such as their polarization or which path they take.

Calculations are performed by inferring the beams of light, like ripples crossing in a pond, and measuring the resulting pattern. These 11 companies all have something working, not only in a lab but a plan for scale, and they have a class of problems they want to solve with these devices. Stage B will validate these 11 companies, and if they survive, they move on to Stage C, which will take one to two years. Then we’ll know definitively if there is actually a real plan for a useful quantum computer by 2033. More will come, but this is the first time a government agency has come in with the requisite scientific background and the right people at DARPA to figure out how to actually verify if these approaches work and they’re not just marketing speak.

There’s a lot of skepticism about quantum computing. The person running it is actually quite a skeptic, and it’s nice to have that because we all get validation. What does this mean for crypto? What does this mean for all of us in the industry as a whole? I believe that quantum computers will exist in the 2030s, and they will be able to run Grover's and Shor's algorithms, which means that quantum computers will likely have the ability to compromise classic crypto either partially or completely.

This means that the majority of mainstream cryptocurrencies will be vulnerable if they do not implement countermeasures by that time. If people are archiving data, there may be cases where encrypted emails or encrypted payloads that were archived can now be decrypted, even if they’re re-encrypted later on with a post-quantum scheme, because they have a copy of the classical encrypted payload. We need to have the ability to protect ourselves as an industry. The answer is we do have some government standards that NIST came up with called FIPS 203, 204, 205, and 206. These standards provide an array of tools, either lattice-based or hash-based, to do encryption, create signatures, and perform all the necessary functions in the cryptocurrency space.

We have a great strategy at Midnight, and that strategy over time can also work its way into Cardano. The strategy is to highly embrace lattice-based crypto, and we’re going to be announcing a project to change the heart of Midnight, Plon, and Halo 2 to a new standard called Nightstream, which relies on lattice-based crypto. It has all these absolutely amazing new properties that leapfrog the state-of-the-art in the industry. We’re going to co-build this with a lot of large companies through a project at the Linux Foundation. We’ll make that announcement early next year as we pull all the threads together.

Next year, as Midnight turns on, it’ll turn on with Plon and Halo 2, but we’re already pre-designing it to have a drop-in replacement so that the engine of Midnight—how it does zero-knowledge cryptography and the cryptography around that—will be post-quantum. This means Midnight will be immune to quantum computers well ahead of the 2033 deadline that DARPA is setting for all these actors as they enter the marketplace. What’s nice about it is we’re looking at this not as a cost center but as an advantage. It turns out that lattices, in particular, have capabilities above and beyond what Ethereum is doing in the hash-based space. There are ways to connect lattices to what’s going on in the AI space with tensors, which means we can use GPUs to accelerate the writing of a proof, the verification of proof, the creation of proof, and the verification of proof.

You don’t have to create custom chips like Ethereum is proposing; you just use the AI chips that are in your phone, laptop, desktop computer, and server, and you can achieve linear scale. This is one of the most exciting pieces of research we have because we’re getting a pretty good understanding of how quantum computers work and quantum information theory so we can understand if we built something that’s immune to these. The reality is that we will collectively have an answer within two years on whether quantum computers are a real thing and if they’re going to be in the market in the 2030s. Based on that answer, we will have pre-built the work in anticipation that they are, so that Midnight can actually be quantum resistant. What’s really cool about that is that Midnight is going to be a folding engine and a recursion engine unlike any other in the entire private computation space.

This means that when you directly observe a blockchain, eventually there will be a path to not only observe it but fold it, which means Midnight can create some of the best and lightest weight state proofs of every system it’s connected to—Cardano, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and so forth. This means that Midnight can be a proof engine over time to not only verify the state of these systems but provide people access to that and sign those payloads with post-quantum signatures. This means its view of the system cannot be corrupted by a quantum computer. This allows you to have a post-quantum checkpoint for Bitcoin and other systems. Even if a quantum computer tries to change the state of things on Midnight, you’re going to have a rollback mechanism.

You’ll have the ability to know what actually happened inside that system before the quantum computer tried to change its state. This is the first step in achieving quantum resistance. There are many other things you have to do. You have to look at post-quantum VRFs, post-quantum VDFs, post-quantum random number generation, and a litany of other concerns. The good news is there’s tons of great cryptography and technology to do these things.

The most important step is to lock truth and lock history in a state where quantum computers can’t break it. We’re making big bets on lattices, and we’re really excited to bring that to bear. There are some phenomenal partners coming in—names you’ve heard of. They may run your laptop. We’re happy to be part of those groups, and they have some of the best scientists in the world.

We’re really excited to be working with the Linux Foundation, the centralized trust, to have the Nightstream project. That project will continue to grow and accelerate over time. Every year, the quantum computing space is massively evolving. They’re inventing new things like time crystals and completely new exotic matters and physics. It’s an all-you-can-eat brain trust of some of the smartest people in the world doing some of the most interesting work in physics, material science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

As a result, we’ve gotten to a point where we’re now asking the serious question: Is this real? Will this actually change the world? This great program from DARPA, QBI, is going to answer that for us. I believe that the answer will be yes, and I believe the answer will be in the 2030s. If we’re wrong, that’s okay because we’ve learned a lot.

What we can do long-term with lattices is unify on-chain and off-chain and bring the world of fully homomorphic encryption into the privacy-enhancing technology space of blockchain technology. So we get a consolation prize, worst-case scenario, and bring the world of AI into the cryptocurrency space along with all the acceleration techniques for it. There’s still a humongous value whether the quantum computers are there or not, which is why we’re pursuing this research agenda. When we look to the future, if they are real, I’m very glad to say that Midnight will have one of the most holistic, comprehensive quantum strategies—not just for itself but for the people that build on it and with it in different ecosystems as well. I highly encourage you guys to check out the DARPA QBI page.

There’s a lovely 40-minute presentation that they’ve done where they talk about the project goals, and there’s actually a podcast as well. I’ll go ahead and post a link here for all of you, and you can look at it and follow along. Congratulations to the 11 companies that survived Stage A. These programs are unusually rigorous; they take a lot of effort and time to get through. I know how difficult it can be to answer questions about grants or government agencies because we’ve done it from time to time at IO, and this is a level beyond that.

All of these companies are staffed with multi-billion-dollar, incredibly brilliant teams and incredibly talented people. I have no doubt at least one of them will probably produce a working quantum computer by the 2030s. Do follow along, and you can see if they survive Stage B. Stage C is definitive verification that we will have a working quantum computer by 2030, and we’ll know that probably no later than the end of 2027. The next two years are going to be pretty crazy.

Thanks, everybody, for listening. I figured I’d share this with you. Cheers.