Emerge’s Tech Trend of the Year 2025: Quantum Computing is No Longer Background Noise

When Caltech scientists turned on their new quantum array of neutral atoms in September, the quantum machine broke a threshold that many scientists thought would take years. For the first time, researchers have managed to capture 6,100 atomic qubits in a single system and maintain coherence in a way that pushed quantum hardware beyond the “toy demo” stage.

What happened in that lab meant that large-scale, error-corrected quantum hardware was no longer a distant ambition, but a credible possibility. And for digital currencies like Bitcoin, whose security depends on cryptography that was considered secure for decades, this is a signal that the quietly increasing threat of quantum computing is now in sight.

The threat is not immediate, but the period for adaptation is finite. That’s why at Emerge we consider the advancement of quantum computing – and cryptocurrency’s lack of preparedness – as our Tech Trend of the Year.

“We now see a path to large, error-corrected quantum computers. The building blocks are in place,” lead researcher Manuel Endres said in a statement.

For years, the default comfort for cryptographers was that quantum computers remained too noisy, too fragile, and too immature to be of interest to crypto. In 2025, that position weakened. Route maps refined. Error correction improved. And several labs produced results that made fault-tolerant machines feel like it was a matter of when, not if.

What has changed in the laboratories

So-called ‘neutral atom systems’ use electrically neutral atoms as qubits, locking individual atoms into fixed positions with lasers so that each can store and manipulate quantum information. “Coherence” measures how long those qubits remain in a usable quantum state before noise destroys them. Both took center stage in 2025 as the field shifted from laboratory demonstrations to architectures designed at scale.

To understand the gains of 2025, it is necessary to understand what has held quantum systems back. Qubits (quantum bits) easily lose their quantum state, and scaling them often amplifies that instability. This year, different systems behaved differently.

Google, IBM and Caltech each reported advances in 2025 that shortened the timeline for fault-tolerant quantum machines. Google’s 105-qubit Willow processor showed a steep drop in error rate as it scaled, and in October the company said its Quantum Echoes benchmark ran about 13,000 times faster than leading supercomputers. The results indicated that stable logical qubits could be achievable with far fewer physical qubits than the thousand-to-one ratios long assumed.

IBM presented the picture from a different angle. The ‘Cat’ family processors demonstrated 120-qubit entanglement and extended coherence, and the 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 execute error correction logic ten times faster than necessary, bringing real-time correction closer to practical use.

Caltech added scale in September with what researchers described as the world’s largest neutral-atom system, capturing 6,100 cesium atoms as qubits, demonstrating coherence for 13 seconds with 99.98% operational accuracy. Together, the results pointed to a broader shift: the quality, control, and scaling efficiency of qubits improved simultaneously, raising expectations about when useful logic qubits — and thus credible threats to Bitcoin’s signature scheme — might arrive.

Erik Garcell, director of quantum enterprise development at Classiq, said the most consequential shift is the changing ratio between physical and logical qubits. “It’s leaning towards a few hundred to one,” he said Decluttera sharp improvement over previous estimates that called for thousands. “Much of the industry’s attention shifted to error correction in 2025.”

Qubits collapse under the influence of the environment, limiting how long they can remain coherent. That’s where error correction comes into play. Error correction works by duplicating the state of a qubit across many physical qubits, giving the system enough redundancy to detect when noise is throwing someone off course and automatically correcting it. Without this, qubits fall apart too quickly to perform meaningful calculations.

Across the field, researchers were saying the same thing: The machines aren’t just growing; they behave.

Bitcoin reads the room

While Bitcoin is not threatened by the machines that exist today, what changed in 2025 changed the tone of the conversation about tomorrow.

Jameson Lopp, who co-founded Casa in 2018 to provide tools to help people store and protect their own Bitcoin, said the risk remains remote.

“Whether or not the network can be ready on time ultimately comes down to how quickly advances in quantum computing occur,” Lopp said. Declutter. “We are orders of magnitude away from having a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. Several major breakthroughs need to happen before it truly becomes a threat to Bitcoin.”

Yet Bitcoin must contend with a limitation that other blockchains such as Ethereum or Zcash do not have: coordination. Migrating to a quantum-safe signature scheme would require simultaneous movement from miners, wallet developers, exchanges, and millions of users.

“I really don’t see that whole process happening in a five-year time frame,” Lopp said. “Once you have millions and millions of individual actors, it becomes effectively impossible to ask them to coordinate to make a change.”

What the experts expect next

Quantum risk is often presented as a sudden moment when the machines become dangerous. Researchers say the reality will look more gradual.

Ethan Heilman, a research fellow at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and co-author of Bitcoin’s BIP-360 post-quantum proposal, said the improvements will accumulate over time. “We will see gradients as it gets stronger and stronger,” he said Declutter.

He works from a long horizon. Bitcoin is already treated as a multi-generational asset by many of its users. “If people treat Bitcoin like a savings account – something they can lock up for a century and expect their children to recover – then the protocol needs to be built to withstand that timeline,” he said.

Heilman expects Bitcoin to adapt. But he noted that markets respond to stagnation rather than risk. “The extent to which Bitcoin does not address this threat could put downward pressure on the price,” he said.

The field, he said, cares less about data than about the direction of progress.

“We will see steady progress, but going from a coal train to Concorde in a year seems very unlikely to me,” he said. “I think it will happen, but I think we will see stages.”

How quickly quantum computers can get there

Alex Shih, head of product at Q-CTRL, said quantum risk won’t make sense until machines can run large, error-corrected algorithms.

“If there are enough quantum computing resources, it could theoretically break the current RSA encryption,” he said. Declutter. “But it will take years to get to that point. Optimistically, maybe the mid-30s.”

Early fault-tolerant machines will not immediately compromise existing cryptography. They will expand the kinds of algorithms that quantum computers can realistically try as reliability improves.

Shih pointed to fragmentation as a challenge that is slowing the field. “Interoperability is still a big problem,” he says. “Each vendor puts out different specifications and frameworks, and it’s left up to the end user to make it all work together.”

Despite these hurdles, 2025 has made the momentum clear. IBM has achieved the milestones in the roadmap. Google’s scaling behavior was in line with expectations. Caltech provided stability on a scale the field had never achieved before.

Together, these results gave researchers a clearer picture of how the next decade could unfold.

The takeaway from 2025 and looking ahead

Quantum computing hasn’t threatened Bitcoin this year, but it has removed the ambiguity.

Researchers talked about timelines with more confidence. Developers in other sectors began to adjust their long-term plans. Bitcoin’s ecosystem — which rarely revisits its cryptographic foundations without outside pressure — approached the 2025 discussion with new seriousness.

By the end of the year, the debate was no longer about whether quantum would matter. It was about when its impact became inevitable.