Microsoft has unveiled Majorana 2, a new topological quantum chip that the company claims is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor — a development that adds fresh urgency to concerns about the future security of Bitcoin and modern cryptography.
The announcement was made during Microsoft's annual Build conference on Tuesday. According to the company, the chip achieves average qubit lifetimes of 20 seconds, with some qubits remaining stable for as long as one minute.
In a blog post following the announcement, Microsoft said its Microsoft Discovery platform and agentic AI tools played a central role in the research process, helping scientists analyze decades of quantum research, identify promising materials, automate measurements, optimize fabrication processes, and uncover manufacturing flaws that improved qubit reliability.
"By applying recent advances in agentic AI specially designed to speed the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft's quantum team is overcoming key barriers in reliability, speed, and size that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios," Microsoft wrote.
Majorana 2 builds on the earlier Majorana 1 chip by replacing its aluminum-based topological superconductor with a lead-based design that better shields qubits from interference. Microsoft said this change led to substantial improvements in both reliability and processing speed. Combined with a compact qubit design, the company now expects to bring scalable quantum computing to reality by 2029.
"We need to make improvements each year that will get us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have massive commercial and societal value," said Microsoft Technical Fellow Chetan Nayak. "We've got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We're 1,000 times better."
To help researchers across multiple countries and disciplines navigate the project's growing body of knowledge, Microsoft's quantum team developed an AI agent that organizes, analyzes, and surfaces information from across the program.
"Using agentic AI to automate the measurements was a game-changer," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft. "It goes through some math and starts saying, 'Hey, where do I find the lowest point where everything sort of works?' And it can do all these voltage adjustments in parallel, which a human cannot do. The way our minds work, we are more linear."
The announcement intensifies ongoing concern over so-called "Q-Day" — the point at which a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break widely used public-key cryptography. Such a breakthrough would allow attackers to derive private keys from exposed public keys and steal funds. Bitcoin is widely considered one of the most significant potential targets, with an estimated $461 billion worth of BTC said to be at risk due to exposed public keys.
"Someone with a quantum computer could authorize a transaction taking all the Bitcoin out of your accounts, or, however you want to think of it, when you did not authorize it. That's the worry," one researcher noted.
Developers are already working to address the vulnerability before it becomes a reality. Microsoft is not alone in reporting rapid progress on the quantum front. In October, Google's Willow chip demonstrated significant reductions in quantum error rates, while more recent research out of Caltech suggested that breaking elliptic-curve cryptography may require fewer quantum resources than previously estimated. Google has projected that Q-Day could arrive by 2032, while other researchers have suggested it could come as early as 2030.
Why it matters
Bitcoin holders with exposed public keys — meaning addresses that have already sent funds — face the most direct risk if a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is built, because attackers could derive private keys from those public keys.
The rapid pace of progress across multiple companies, including Microsoft and Google, means the timeline to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is actively narrowing, making the threat more concrete than theoretical.
Developers are already working to address the vulnerability before it becomes a reality, underscoring that the window for implementing quantum-resistant protections is a live concern for the industry.
