How Algorand Is Preparing Blockchain Infrastructure for the Quantum Threat.

[00:00:03] Welcome back to the Tech Talks Daily podcast, where every day we cut through the noise surrounding emerging technologies and focus on what they actually mean for businesses, developers, and the people building tomorrow's digital infrastructure. And over the last, what, three years, AI has dominated almost every technology conversation.

[00:00:22] And while blockchain has quietly continued to mature behind the scenes, at the same time, another topic has moved from academic research and into boardroom discussions. And yeah, I'm talking about quantum computing.

[00:00:38] And questions that once felt theoretical are suddenly becoming practical, particularly around security, digital trust, and how today's systems will withstand tomorrow's computing power. So my guest today is Bruno Martins. He's the Chief Technology Officer at the Algorand Foundation.

[00:01:01] And having spent years building blockchain solutions across several major ecosystems, he will bring with him today a rare combination of deep technical knowledge and the ability to explain complex ideas in plain English. So today we're going to discuss why organizations should already be preparing for a post-quantum world and explore how blockchain is evolving beyond cryptocurrency and into enterprise applications.

[00:01:31] And what business leaders should be looking for when evaluating distributed ledger technologies in a market that still has plenty of hype alongside genuine innovation. But enough from me. Let me introduce you to Bruno right away. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Yeah, thanks, Neil. So yeah, so I'm Bruno. I'm currently CTO at the Algorand Foundation.

[00:02:01] I joined three and a half years ago, if I remember correctly. Been in this space a little bit since the 2010s, sort of paid attention. My first project was actually getting involved with Monero on my own personal sort of time. And just I have interesting for cryptography and key management systems and wallets and hardware, that type of stuff.

[00:02:29] And eventually joined Consensus for a few years, spent a lot of time in Ethereum. And then briefly joined Cardano as well. And then Algorand kind of wooed me with his technical and elegant Consensus primitives. And yeah, here I am. I love it. And you have had an incredible journey there. And you've earned your stripes in the world of blockchain and crypto.

[00:02:54] And before we begin, I must congratulate you on your appointment as CTO of the Algorand Foundation. Because you're someone that has spent, what, years building blockchain solutions for enterprises. But I've got to ask, I mean, looking back, you've seen so many highs and lows. It's a big roller coaster ride. What has changed most in how businesses and institutions evaluate blockchain technology today, compared with five years ago when AI came along and stole everybody's thunder?

[00:03:23] But what have you seen change most? Yeah, a few things. So I did spend quite a bit of time building solutions for companies that were interested in adopting distributed tech, distributed ledgers, blockchains, particularly in their operations. Initially, it was mostly around, hey, there's this new tech.

[00:03:45] Could we do such and such business flow, trading, documentation, and any sort of attestations, tokenization was a big thing in the 2018, 2019s. And now it's back in some way. But the ICOs was kind of a big topic at the time. It was mostly experimental. Today, I think the vibe is a bit different.

[00:04:13] People are actually trying to incorporate in real use cases and trying to give legitimacy to the tech. Rightly so. I do still think it's very immature. I think this space has a lot to grow in. Not just one area is the technical standards in which we operate in.

[00:04:40] It's not very open to connect to the rest of the internet as we know it. We like to do things our own way. And a lot of times they keep us in a technological bubble, which forces businesses to make really hard choices on. I can only pick a winner or two. It doesn't see the industry as a whole.

[00:05:04] And sometimes the technical merits of different networks are not part of the equation because they have to pick a horse that fits sort of the business case. The other side is more market-wise. There are so many networks. There are so many approaches to build distributed tech that it can be a bit of a confusing choice. And I think there's a lot of forks.

[00:05:34] And quite honestly, I think most projects out there clone each other's ideas and do make compromises. As we do anytime we build distributed tech. Compromises need to happen. But there are so many out there that signals to me that the consolidation of technical merits hasn't come yet. And that decision is not easy for anybody building a business.

[00:06:04] And that's apparent to me. So it's going to be around for many years. The tech is legit. It's here to stay. But there's some growing up to do and to make life easier for business to make their choices as well. 100% with you. And another big change, I think, is quantum computing. Moving towards, from what was just theory, towards a very real reality.

[00:06:29] And recent research has even reignited discussions about its impact on digital security. There's a lot of talk around, for example, Harvest Now, Decrypt Later. That's a big topic. But for listeners who might not be cryptographers, it'd be great to get everyone on board here. Make sure we don't leave anyone behind. Can you explain why quantum computing poses a challenge for existing security systems?

[00:06:55] And why the blockchain industry is paying very close attention to it right now? Yeah, good question. So actually, I think it's everybody. It's not just blockchain tech that needs to pay attention to this. The whole, our communication systems, our financial infrastructure, everything around the internet needs to pay attention to this issue. And it's mostly because of the cryptography that we use today.

[00:07:23] In very simple terms, we use several flavors of cryptography. But there was one that has kind of become popular the last few decades. And rightly so, because it gives a lot of security properties based on elliptic curve systems. And that is what is at risk here.

[00:07:46] Because there is a specific algorithm that was theorized by a famous cryptographer. It's called the Shores algorithm. I hope I'm saying correctly. And that algorithm in particular allows you, by just having public information, to run it on a computer using qubits and whatnot. To find what's called a scalar or private key as people use. If people use wallets, they'll be familiar with.

[00:08:16] They need to keep this information private is what allows you to spend. And allow you to discover that just based on public information. So, obviously, in blockchain tech, all our public keys, all our addresses and accounts is what we use to send assets to each other. And that's essentially the public information that you need on a quantum computer to get the keys of your account.

[00:08:44] But this is true for the way communications through this call or in browsers or WhatsApps and signals, everything. Most technology today has some form of elliptic curve cryptography in it. So, if quantum computers were to come online today, it's our Y2K moment.

[00:09:13] And this is... There are some parallels to that because if quantum computer comes online, we're in trouble. So, we know it's not going to come tomorrow. But we need to have a plan. And we need to understand the compromises. There's compromises as well to moving to a quantum-resistant world. But when it does come online, it's just part of the new world. And being quantum-resistant is not going to be a feature.

[00:09:43] It's just how software and infrastructure needs to exist for us to have a secure internet and blockchains in particular. Yeah. So, we're thinking of this quite heavily just for quite a while. And I think it's just the responsible thing to do. Completely agree. And especially around it being almost a Y2K moment. But there is a big tendency of people online treating quantum threats as almost a distant problem.

[00:10:12] I'm hopeful that that is changing now. But from your perspective, how urgent is that need for organizations to start thinking about post-quantum security? And what mistakes are being made by those assuming that they will address it later when it happens? Because what are you saying here? So, it depends who you ask. So, I do think we're at the moment... There's some consensus in everybody.

[00:10:39] It's like a few years ago, it was like, oh yeah, it was going to be decades down the line. It seems more likely than not that it's going to happen, that quantum computers are possible to exist. So, for the longest time, we know all these labs trying to build physically these quantum computers. And they're not very stable. They're prone to errors, they break down.

[00:11:02] So, there's a lot of questions around, are they even physically possible to be stable enough to scale and do real computation? It's still an open question, but the trend seems to be everything is converging towards it's more likely going to exist. And also, the theory and the error correction techniques around it, everything is converging to it's more likely to be a reality than just theory.

[00:11:32] The timelines is what people sort of argue a lot about. Some people say 2029, 2030, 2031 is sort of the earliest that it can happen. Others, people still talk in decades. And I don't think it's so much of a distant problem anymore. It's more of a... It's being responsible. So, it might not happen. Let's say it doesn't happen.

[00:12:02] The threat today is still real. So, I think everybody needs to have a plan. It could be responsible to not have a plan. And we need to give flexibility to these systems to migrate. And the users need time to migrate. Anybody who tried to migrate ecosystems, people who already have applications and wallets and infrastructure, and they have real businesses depending on tech,

[00:12:33] trying to migrate users is some of the hardest things. It might take months to do. So, if the quantum threat comes next year, migrating alone, educating people to change their behavior, tooling, that's even a harder problem than changing sometimes protocol and making no changes. So, I don't think it's a distant... I don't think it's a distant problem anymore.

[00:12:57] I would say it's a very immediate threat, given what even governments now are getting involved, saying, okay, this is a problem. The big organizations that people look for guidance, like Myst, which everybody's going to build hardware based on their endorsement of certain cryptographic primitives, they are saying this is a real threat. So, there's smoke and the threat is probably real.

[00:13:24] And I also wanted to highlight that, Algorand, you've been working on post-quantum security initiatives for several years now. So, what practical steps are involved in transitioning a large-scale digital platform towards a more quantum-resistant security without disrupting existing users, applications, infrastructure, and all those things that make people nervous? Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah.

[00:13:50] So, historically, Algorand and the team at the time made the smart move of looking into these new cryptographic primitives and start doing R&D on it and studying. And I think at the time, the quantum issue was on everybody's mind, but it was not such an immediate issue as it is today. As people understand, it's probably coming.

[00:14:17] It was probably more around R&D and inheriting some nice properties. These new cryptographic primitives gives you some nice properties. And initially, this particular signature scheme called Falcon, which was immediately at that time deployed to give Algorand state proofs. And state proofs is what gives integrity to the historical, let's say, the past transactions and the state of the ledger in the past.

[00:14:46] It's a strength because state proofs, we randomly select people on the network based on their stake and can get a bit technical. But everybody, hundreds of people come together and they all produce this proof, which they sign with this scheme called Falcon. And nobody can corrupt or can lie about the state of the ledger moving forward.

[00:15:11] And that ends up to be quantum resistant because we use this scheme called Falcon, which is based on lattices and not an elliptic curve. And some of the more interesting properties at the time was not even its quantum resistance.

[00:15:25] It's the ability to potentially do distributed trustless bridging between systems because you can produce circuits to prove the state of a network without trusting specific entities or a static validator set that participates in some system, which is what happens today with bridges.

[00:15:49] And every time we move assets across system, we have to trust either a subset of non-parties or trust specific parties to do so. And this technology has very interesting properties that allow us in the future to do this. I just trust the network. I don't need to trust anybody to know what was the state of Algorand or some other network at this time. Therefore, we can cross assets.

[00:16:17] That was just interesting at the time and ended up being quantum resistant. Today, we are reusing the experience that we have, which we do have experience using Falcon and these lattice-based systems that are quantum resistant. And so we are applying this to regular accounts so that people today can have classical accounts or PewQ accounts. We are basically making Algorand agile in its cryptographic properties.

[00:16:47] So you can have accounts based on different schemes, which traditionally from Bitcoin, Ethereum, most networks, you have one scheme, one account type. And that's what you use throughout the history of your activity on the network. So we're introducing quantum resistant schemes. So from your wallet, you can create schemes based on these quantum resistant primitives. And then we're also looking at consensus.

[00:17:12] Because consensus itself in Algorand does rely on elliptic curve cryptography. Now, it turns out that Algorand is already quite resistant to quantum attacks more than we previously thought. We can lose certain properties at consensus, like the anonymity of who's participating in consensus can be lost if a quantum computer can't be online tomorrow.

[00:17:37] But we know today that they couldn't hijack seats as doing in consensus. But there's other elements that we need to harden. So this consensus property, we call the VRF, we will have to harden this. And we have a plan. And early next year, probably we'll have some news about this.

[00:17:59] We're lucky to have quite well-known, experienced, talented cryptographers and mathematicians led by our chief scientific officer, Chris Pichard, that has worked on these systems for decades. So we'll have some advantage there that we can put out things a little bit early than perhaps others could do. And we're happy to do so. And it helps everybody and ourselves, obviously.

[00:18:29] And then there's other elements that we still need to touch, which is the network itself. When talks to each other and there's votes on what blocks, certifying blocks and whatnot, those messages and those, they are signed by people trying to certify votes blocks, I'd say. That still relies on classical cryptography. So we're going to upgrade that.

[00:18:54] Now, I would say, and this is mostly for most networks, we could make the choice of just moving straight to quantum-resistant cryptography and leave the classical behind. And I personally think that's a little bit jumping the gun, as we say. We have quite a bit of experience with lattice-based schemes and quantum-resistant schemes.

[00:19:20] But we still don't know if these new schemes, besides Falcon, there's so many new crypto primitives showing up. We still don't know if these new schemes are even classically secure. Because they haven't had the decades in the field at scale of battle-hardening and being battle-tested in the wild for decades like our traditional cryptography has.

[00:19:48] So even though we can release a quantum-resistant scheme, we still need to keep in the back of our minds that we don't know if they're even going to survive the test of time. They might be just classically insecure as well. People might find bugs. With AI today, you can find things a little bit more easy if there's exploits.

[00:20:09] So a network being agile in its signature schemes is the prudent thing to do, in my opinion, because it allows us to offer hybrid schemes to its users and institutions in a way that, for example, your accounts can be protected by both sides of cryptography. Both the classical side and the quantum-resistant side.

[00:20:35] And if one breaks for any reason, the other one still protects it. Both classical and quantum-resistant. So that's a long explanation, but there's a lot to impact on this, on our reasoning how to secure a whole network that is already running. My people argue it's probably easier to build a new one. I disagree.

[00:21:00] I think there's even a bigger risk in doing that because of the issues I just mentioned. Yeah. But we're on the issue quite heavily, so we understand it. Your agents aren't producing accurate answers because they don't have a complete semantic understanding of your data. And Denodo is solving this and solving it through semantic consistency.

[00:21:27] Through semantic consistency, your agents can start making accurate predictions in real time. So see what else Denodo can do by visiting denodo.com to learn more. But now let me introduce you to today's guest. And although the industry is still in its infancy, especially around blockchain, I think we're seeing tremendous maturity now and the discussion is thinking bigger and moving beyond just cryptocurrencies.

[00:21:55] But where are you seeing the most meaningful adoption of blockchain today? In areas from payments, digital assets, identity, data integrity, financial services. It feels like there's a lot to play for here. But where are you seeing the most adoption? So lately, and I would say in the past few months, everybody is talking about identity and agentic commerce.

[00:22:20] And it's a new, all the ones you described, I think has been theorized and some applications has been around. But the new kid on the block, let's say it's the agentic commerce story, which I personally think it makes sense. And if you think of agents actually in real time doing commerce with each other between agents to agents,

[00:22:48] my agent talks to your agent or negotiate prices and buy endpoints usage, which was always theorized as early internet, but never actually used. It will need a lot of those financial instruments, will need access to DeFi protocols. Identity will be a big one.

[00:23:14] So if we look on most blockchain systems, there is a problem with linking digital identity to real identity or to other non-links. For example, if my agent makes transactions, most likely at some point, especially for compliance reasons or operational reasons,

[00:23:39] you might want to know this transaction was done by this address or this account. Who does it belong to? Who is its owner? To which domain it belongs to? Am I speaking with, am I transacting with Amazon's agent or Google agent? How do I know my agent is speaking with somebody trustworthy? All of this story. It's probably where blockchain is also going to become relevant.

[00:24:05] And all the stablecoin narrative today gets stronger with agents. I don't think it's going to trade in like Bitcoin, for example. If people are going to do real commerce, they probably want a stable value on the token they're going to exchange. And probably stablecoin is the better rails for that. So all of those with agentic now are like on steroids.

[00:24:32] So we're going to need all of those for agentic commerce. And over the last 10 years, one challenge many enterprises have faced is separating the hype that surrounds blockchain from that genuine business value. Ironically, we're almost seeing the same with AI now. But when you're speaking with institutions that are evaluating new platforms, what are the key technical and operational criteria that they should be considering before jumping in and making an investment decision?

[00:25:03] The technicals, I think it's going back to this industry being a little bit immature. It's almost like there's too much choice, too much copy paste. And there's a lot of tribalism. And we just look at how many blockchains there is and how many new ones appear all the time.

[00:25:29] And you have to ask, does it warrant new networks appear all the time? If there's significant breakthroughs, it makes sense. Like Algorand has a significant breakthrough in distributed systems. It's not well known to a lot of people.

[00:25:46] But it's a hard conversation to have when internally in companies and investors, when there's so much choice and you cannot do an assessment to everybody. So that's a real hard thing to track. In terms of hype, yeah, this is a bit of a hype situation.

[00:26:13] And the market will prefer efficiency over time. And I think the hype will wind down. And I do like these cycles where things wind down a little bit because it keeps things a little bit more honest. And the honest projects will likely survive. And when you try to build something meaningful, you should look for properties. And a lot of projects are now doing that. One example is, for example, in the area of payments.

[00:26:41] Let's say you want to issue a card, cards backed by stable coins. You could build those on most networks. Technically, you can get a Visa or MasterCard license. You issue a card. You're responsible for settling with those schemes with Visa, MasterCard. It's backed by crypto. You expect the user to have its crypto and at a moment of payment, give it to you and all of this.

[00:27:11] But if you want real trust in a distributed system or a blockchain for your business operations, even though you could make it with Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other network. You're always taking a little bit of risk if you cannot trust the system to give you finality on the operation.

[00:27:34] So if somebody uses the card and you want to make a trade and you're on the hook to make your payment to Visa or MasterCard at the end of the day, you don't want to have a heavy burden on risk management to know if the chain state doesn't end up what I think is going to end up. I'm on the hook to make this payment. I'll be at a loss.

[00:27:57] I want to trust the underlying infrastructure that at the point of payment, I know what its state and I can proceed with my business without incurring losses throughout the course of the year. This happens today in a lot of layer ones because blockchains do have, they struggle when there is new blocks coming in.

[00:28:21] They struggle to a lot of times finalize which version, because there can be multiple right answers at any given time and time sensitive operations. They would like to have finality and what is the state, not wait for six blocks, meaning an hour in some networks for that thing to resolve. That's really a friction for business to happen on blockchain systems a lot of times.

[00:28:51] And they could build all ones and side chains and have other supporting side systems to a blockchain system. But in this case, this is what networks, what the algorithm are really strong is because you trust the state of the ledger immediately after it shows up in a immediate after it's updated. There's no possible two answers.

[00:29:17] And so if you're building anything time sensitive, like a payment system, you want that because you operate at no risk. Now, what I just described here, it's a very nuanced business technical analysis that because I know Algorand, I know other blockchain systems, I've built these systems.

[00:29:39] I know to describe this as a business case, but to get this study in every org when they have hundreds and thousands of networks to compare. A lot of times this nuance doesn't bubble up to the top. So this is why I think we still have a long way to go in terms of maturity for the right use cases to match the right networks.

[00:30:09] This is what we need some maturity of. And you've worked across multiple blockchain ecosystems. And from an engineering perspective here, what is it that distinguishes a blockchain platform that's ready for enterprise scale deployment, even though we are still in early stages, from the ones that are still primarily serving experimentation and pilot projects? What's the best way of seeing which are more mature than others, I suppose?

[00:30:37] So any distributed system. So if you, if you look at all networks, any distributed system does need to make some compromises for the most part. And, and depends what you want as a, an, an enterprise. And if you want to operate globally, so Bitcoin gave us, gives us the blockchain. Ethereum gives the programmability. Monero gives us privacy. Algorand gives us finality.

[00:31:06] Like it depends, uh, what your use case is. If you just want to hold, um, if you want to hold a digital asset, uh, as a hedge, a lot of people argue Bitcoin is enough. And, uh, this, you could, you could argue it's an enterprise system at scale doing what was designed to do and you don't need anything else.

[00:31:30] But if you want to, uh, you probably would need smart contract, um, um, capability. You need programmability. Uh, and that is, here's where you have a lot of choice because a lot of networks have endorsed the programmability aspect of it and the smart contracts. And there's multiple virtual machines, multiple languages.

[00:31:53] For me, what I think the missing pieces is, is the finality piece is what is important to really reach scale and the trust in the system that I described previously. Uh, and, and that you need a network that has the throughput, uh, has the decentralization, uh, and has the finality, um, ability to that because you don't want.

[00:32:15] To do, uh, to build around the system that any given point can decide to have multiple right answers and either you have to wait or make a decision and take on risk. Uh, there's many networks today. If only thing you care about is speed and let's say you don't care about decentralization. I would argue if you don't care about decentralization in a way, the, the blockchain element is probably not as important to the system.

[00:32:43] Uh, but if you do care about, uh, uh, decentralization, uh, networks like Algorand today at one, one layer only without the need for multiple layers today already offers several thousands transactions a second, uh, of throughput for you to, uh, run your business on. Um, and some networks, uh, I would analyze frozen a business position.

[00:33:12] I'll analyze how much trust do I need to put in regional locations, infrastructure vendors. Uh, and I will always argue that Algorand has the right balance between throughput speeds, security, um, and finality, uh, of all obviously. But, uh, I think those are all characteristics that anybody building a business needs to, needs to consider.

[00:33:39] So I think a lot of networks today have the throughput, a lot of them at the strong compromise. Uh, but if you just want speed and you don't want decentralization aspects, you probably have a lot of choice. If you want to throughput finality, but you still care about decentralization on a single layer, you probably don't have much choice today.

[00:34:03] Uh, but it's get, it's hard to get the answer with thousands of options to assess, uh, on solely technical merits is a, is a hard thing to do. And although, as we've stated, we're still in the infancy here, there's a lot of maturity needed. And if we think about the average business leader that could be listening to our conversation today,

[00:34:26] what do you think they're possibly underestimating most about the future of digital trust, cryptography, blockchain infrastructure, and the role that quantum computing could play in reshaping all of these things? I, I know we're probably a few years away yet, but what are people underestimating most? Do you think? I think the quantum story is not, it was not being underestimated. Actually.

[00:34:48] Uh, I do think in the, in the past, I wouldn't even say here in the past months, the narrative changed completely. And, and, uh, and I think the Google paper that came out a few months ago had a lot to do with that because it really put people on alert. And organizations like NIST already signal that before as well. Uh, so I, I think the quantum story is not being underestimated.

[00:35:15] And I, I do, I do think every project out there, at least every legit project out there, um, is, uh, is conceptualizing a quantum, uh, plan. I've seen the Bitcoin community, the Ethereum community, the Cardano community, uh, everybody is, uh, talking about quantum. And, and I think it's a responsible thing to do. Uh, so I don't think that's being underestimating.

[00:35:42] And, uh, uh, and in some ways that there's some aspects where the blockchain world is kind of leading the charge. And, and I do think it's a, it's a consequence of it's this space that is pushing the, the envelope on R and D and advancements in cryptographic techniques and tooling. Um, a lot of the cryptography world has been a bit, I wouldn't say people agree with me, but to say a little bit stale, it's like it's, it's established.

[00:36:11] It works and it only when distributed systems come say, oh, we have to find new techniques to do certain things. And, uh, and I think this is the blockchain space kind of leading the way in some areas, the traditional world probably won't need the techniques that we need, uh, to secure systems in a quantum resistant way. Uh, simply because they're not distributed.

[00:36:35] They don't have issues with consensus and, uh, they don't use the same infrastructure we do. Uh, so our techniques might be a bit different and for them might be a more clear cut, uh, path to quantum resistance, uh, for blockchains is not. Uh, and yes, but, uh, we, we have a few years on this, or I think at least us will be fine.

[00:36:58] There'll be multiple, uh, competing ideas, how to do this, but, uh, it's definitely not being underestimated. I, then on that, I'm comfortable saying. And we've talked a lot around the technology, the adoption and so many other areas today, but one thing we've not really covered is your passionate community out there from crypto Twitter to discord. I know there'll be a lot of people listening from there and people listening, maybe new to this space.

[00:37:26] Maybe they're thinking of joining your community, wanting to learn more about Algorand, et cetera. Where should, where should everyone go that wants to just find more information and continue growing that community too? Yeah. So we're on discord and there's our website, algorand.co. Uh, we're active on, on X. Uh, I'm trying to be, I was never a social media person. I'm trying to, I'm trying to be a little bit more, uh, but yeah.

[00:37:54] And, uh, and so we, we have, um, um, you can reach us on email. If you have questions, especially if you have projects can reach out to me personally, if you're having a startup and you're considering multiple networks. Uh, I just want to chat about it, get an opinion. And you can reach out to us, can email us. You're probably getting in touch with me. Uh, I'll be honest.

[00:38:20] Uh, if it's not the proper use case for Algorand, I'll say it's like every, these networks do have compromise. Sometimes they're not best for everything. Algorand is good at almost everything I would say. But, uh, yeah, reach out to us and, uh, quantum also extends here for, I like to call book collaborate with other, um, blockchain projects.

[00:38:45] Uh, and, uh, and particularly because I do think the, as I mentioned, the industry sort of is a bit tribal. And a lot of, a lot of times we keep ourselves in a bubble, but we do have to talk to each other. Uh, because the way the user talks with applications and with their, uh, their devices, uh, we all have different ways of doing things.

[00:39:07] It will be nice to have a uniform experience for, for all of this and the agreement on how our hardware wallet's going to work, uh, how our wallet's going to work in a quantum world. For example, uh, it's important to have that conversation cross ecosystem. Uh, it's a signal of maturity if we align ideas moving forward and, uh, it benefits everybody. Uh, so I extend that as well.

[00:39:33] So if I just want to reach out, talk about quantum and lattices and, uh, Love it. And thank you so much for sitting down today and discussing what quantum computing actually means for crypto, how the industry is preparing for it, talking about how large scale digital systems are designed to remain secure and reliable over time. And what enterprises and institutions look for when evaluating new technology platforms.

[00:40:01] So many big takeaways and most of all, the, your passionate community. I hope there's something of value for those people listening. So I'll include links to everything that you just mentioned. Anybody interested in this space, I would say, please pop along. They are a very welcoming community there, but more than anything, just thank you for joining me today and talking about all this stuff in a language everyone can understand. Really appreciate it, Tom. Nice to meet you, Neil. Thanks so much.

[00:40:26] One thing I really appreciated about today's conversation was the balanced perspective. Yep, quantum computing isn't something to panic about tomorrow morning, but neither is it a problem that businesses can afford to ignore until the last possible minute. Because preparing for change often takes longer than the technology itself.

[00:40:48] And it was refreshing that Bruno acknowledged that blockchain is still maturing rather than claiming that a heavy problem needs a blockchain. But he highlighted the importance of choosing the right technology for the right use case and also understanding the tradeoffs between every single architectural decision. And for me, that kind of honesty is something that our industry could probably use a lot more of.

[00:41:13] So whether your interest is digital assets, payments, identity, enterprise infrastructure, or simply trying to understand where quantum computing could take us next, I hope today's discussion helped you separate some of those long-term trends with those short-term headlines. But as always, love to hear your thoughts. How do you think organisations should be preparing for that post-quantum future?

[00:41:37] And do you think blockchain is finally reaching that level of maturity that enterprises have been waiting for? techtalksnetwork.com, you'll find 4,000 interviews there, lots to talk about. And if you enjoyed yourself, why not come back again and enjoy the next podcast? I've got another great guest lined up very soon. So you're all cordially invited, and hopefully I'll get to speak with you again then. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.