A Company Shared a Breakthrough In Quantum Computing. Its Shares Are Climbing.

Shares of IonQ are jumping on Wednesday after the company shared a technological breakthrough in quantum computing.

The company's stock soared more than 10% before pairing gains. It climbed about 5% at 10:13 a.m. ET after demonstrating the industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error decoder. Other companies in the same industry also saw gains.

IonQ noted in a statement that quantum error correction is "essential for building practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers because physical qubits are inherently sensitive to environmental noise."

Finding and fixing the mistakes, the company claimed, has been historically difficult and "classical computers tasked with decoding errors can easily become overwhelmed."

"That creates a processing bottleneck that forces the quantum computer to pause and wait. IonQ's breakthrough demonstrates that a single, standard computer processor can manage this complex workload continuously in the background, keeping the quantum system running at full speed," the company noted.

John Gamble, Vice President at IonQ Architecture said the breakthrough "supports our vision for fault tolerance where time-to-solution, cost-to-solution, and energy-to-solution are always our North Star."

IonQ has partnered with Amazon Web Services, Nvidia and AstraZeneca, among others. It recently acquired semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater Technologies and raised its full-year revenue guidance.

Quantum breakthroughs could have a strong impact on the crypto industry, which has been preparing for the risk that they may one day break the encryption used to protect digital wallets and blockchain transactions,

Quantum computers are designed to solve certain mathematical problems far faster than conventional computers. That matters for crypto because most major blockchains rely on older public-key cryptography to verify ownership and authorize transactions. If a powerful quantum computer derived a private key from a visible public key, an attacker could sign transactions and move assets without the owner's permission.

Most blockchains use elliptic-curve cryptography for public and private keys. Public keys are often revealed once a wallet is used in a transaction. Bitcoin is seen as especially exposed because its 17-year transaction history has left many public keys visible on-chain.

About 35% of Bitcoin's circulating supply could be exposed to a quantum attack, according to an unpublished June 2026 working paper cited by the outlet. Other research has placed the estimate as high as 50%. A separate Deloitte analysis said more than 4 million Bitcoin, or about 25% of supply at the time of its study, was potentially vulnerable because of exposed public keys and address reuse.

The risk is not limited to crypto, but public blockchains have specific challenges. Transactions are transparent, permanent, and generally irreversible.

Google Research said future quantum computers may be able to break the elliptic-curve cryptography used by cryptocurrency systems with fewer resources than previously understood. The company said it is working toward a 2029 migration timeline for most of its authentication and digital signature systems and urged the cryptocurrency community to move toward post-quantum cryptography.