Well, Ripple announced on Monday a step-by-step plan to prepare the XRP Ledger against quantum computer attacks by 2028. This came after a Google study showing that, in the future, these machines could be capable of breaking the cryptography of blockchains around 2032.

According to the schedule, at the very beginning of 2026 they will start testing some more resilient cryptographies and also a hybrid system, which runs alongside what already exists today. To give more speed to the thing, Ripple is working with Project Eleven, which deals with validator tests and some initial custody prototypes for this so-called post-quantum.

The plan also includes a 'guarantee workaround' for the so-called 'Q Day' (Quantum-Day). If things tighten up sooner than expected and current encryption fails, it will be possible to securely migrate accounts to a model protected against these attacks. The folks at RippleX said that the idea is to maintain what already works well on the XRP Ledger, but without failing to prepare for the unexpected, avoiding headaches if this 'Q Day' suddenly arrives.

This rush came from a study by Google Quantum AI, which showed that a quantum computer with about 500,000 qubits would already be able to break ECDLP-256 encryption — much less than previously thought. And more: they say it would be possible to discover a private key in about nine minutes, you know.

And it's not just XRP, you see? This risk affects the entire blockchain world. More than 6.9 million Bitcoin — almost a third of the total — are in wallets where the public key has already been exposed, which could become a problem with these future computers.

The team developing Bitcoin is already brainstorming solutions, including new improvement proposals. In the meantime, the Ethereum Foundation has assembled a team solely to handle this post-quantum part and get the system ready for whatever comes.

Now, an interesting detail: the XRP Ledger already has a native key exchange scheme, which makes this adaptation much easier. In other networks, like Ethereum, people would have to manually move assets to new accounts — it's more work than carrying water in a sieve, you know.$XRP ,$ETH ,$BTC