Limitless Podcast - The Quantum Computing Moment: The Last Tech Frontier

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Quantum computing is shaping up to be the next major technology after AI, especially in the wake of U.S. efforts to speed up development and prepare for quantum security threats.So let's walk through the basics of qubits, the impact on encryption and Bitcoin, and the main companies and applications currently shaping the field.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Quantum’s Next Wave3:04 How Qubits Break Encryption6:35 Trump’s Quantum Executive Orders9:31 Fault Tolerance Explained12:11 IBM Enters the Race15:47 Rigetti and D-Wave18:33 Quantum’s AI Moment------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

It came across this post that asked the question, what comes after AI? And I was thinking to myself, AI's been my entire universe for a long time. What does actually come afterwards? And I thought, robotics, we have space. We also have this thing called quantum computing. And I was like, huh, it's been a while since we've talked about quantum computing. What's going on there? It turns out, the answer is quite a bit.

Starting with the precedent of the United States, who just signed two executive orders, accelerating the rate of progress that we have around quantum computing, as well as personally taking the balance sheet of the United States of America and using it to invest privately in a few of these quantum computers. company. So this episode, we're going to unpack the quantum opportunity. What's going on, give you an update on the state of things, as well as where you can find optimal places to put your money in the case that you are bullish on quantum as a category, and you think it is going to be one of the next upcoming trends. This, of course, none of this will be financial advice, although if you've been

copy trading the president of the United States for a while, you've knew pretty damn good. So that's what compelled us to want to make this episode. We were personally curious, and hopefully this curiosity can be shared with you guys who are listening and you can get something pretty positive out of it. You know, it's so interesting. I've always thought of the United States government as being like a customer of innovation. So like they buy the rockets. They buy the weapons. They invest in the labs. But they never actually take like an equity upside in any of these companies. And recently they've been doing that with AI. And now they're doing it with a new technology, which is not technically new, but is coming into its kind of like chat GPT type moment, which is quantum technology itself. They signed two executive orders yesterday. One is focusing or directing federal agents. to work very closely with the companies that are building this new quantum technology,

work with the academics and understand how this works with the sole goal of building a quantum computer by 2028, which supposedly is going to solve all our problems. And then order number two is directing all the agencies, the governments, the companies that exist and run the world today and the country of the United States of America to harden their systems against potential quantum attacks. Quantum computers, as we're going to explain in a short second, could be used very maliciously. if placed in the wrong hands. Now, Josh, I know you've been looking into

how these quantum computers work and how they're different from classic computers, but the way I understand it is it's very different from a classic computer. Typically, a classic computer operates in bits. So it's either zero or it's either one, and it's a bunch of zero and ones, and this computes a bunch of different algorithms

which run on the AI chips that we speak about all the time on this show, or any kind of software that you run on your app or on your phone or whatever that might. Now, the difference here is with the quantum computers, they have this thing called qubits, which means that they could be a zero and a one at the same time. So it's this weird thing called superposition. I don't know.

Can you explain this? Yeah, and every state in between. So it's basically not any state until it's observed. And that state exists in this thing called a superposition, which means it's both of them at the same time and both of them not at all. It's this very weird concept, drop your head around. But applied to a practical sense, we are trying to create as many qubits as possible, which you could think of as the modern-day equivalent of a bit,

but the futurized version. And the thing that that unlocks because they exist in the superposition is the interesting part. When you think about encryption, the thing that underlines all of the internet, everything digital, it's the way that we have privacy, it's the way that we have security, that relies on this thing called prime number factorization. And basically it exists by multiplying two very large numbers together, but then reversing the process to figure out the numbers that were multiplied to get that

large number is really difficult. And traditional computers have to spend millions to billions of years trying to decrypt that. And because it takes so long to do that, they're incapable of decrypting standard login information, for example. When you type in your password, it's encrypted using this prime factorization. What quantum decryption can do, because it has these cubits that exist in all these positions at once, it can do this factorization math very quick. And it can reverse the process of, let's say, a password that's been encrypted in a matter

of seconds, maybe even less. So it kind of breaks down the underlying security. of the internet, I guess we could say. And that is one of many second order effects that happens from encryption. I think we have a lot of progress to be made around biology, taking these large spots of data like we have with our DNA makeup and making sense of it. There's a lot of really interesting use cases and applications. It's just been difficult because we haven't been able to figure out these things called fault-tolerant qubits, basically bits on a computer that work. And we're measuring these by the tens and the dozens. We're not talking about terabytes, which are trillions of bits,

but we are on our way. So it very much feels like that very early stage of the exponential, where we're back in the day we used to measure bits before we even got to a kill a bit of information, and then we got to a megabut and then terabit and then pet a bit and then we does the whole thing. We're at the bit stage where we can measure them individually instead of by the dozens or hundreds. And that is where we're getting in now with this executive order in President Trump. He's buying real early into this exponential curve here. And I think like, you know, you mentioned the number that were in the tens and the dozens, and that might lead you to think that, like,

we haven't made much progress at all. But I was reading, like, you know, if you had 300 of these cubits, you could basically simulate every single atom in the universe, theoretically. We're not quite there yet, but practically you could. The other thing I was thinking about is, okay, if I'm listening to this, and I'm still confused by everything you just said,

what are the main applications that you could potentially use for a quantum computer that is supposed to be built in 2028? Well, as I understand, there's two main applications. One is simulating molecules. So in the sense of creating new drug discoveries where you can cure certain ailments or cancers or whatever that might be, quantum computers theoretically could fix this

in a matter of hours if applied in the correct way. But also materials that we don't even know could exist today, combinations of chemistries and compounds or whatever that might be, can be solved by quantum computers. So anything from a molecular simulation side of things can be resolved and solved by a quantum computer, a computer once it's functionally accurate. The second application is cryptography.

Cryptography basically hardens every security system in the entire world right now. It underpins. It's the substrate behind Bitcoin and a lot of cryptographic security systems in the world. Now, if you have a quantum computer, you can basically surpass or break through this barrier, which is why Executive Order No. 2 from Trump signed yesterday basically said, hey, any major system that runs and operates a bulk of the world's GDP today needs to start preparing and becoming quantum resistant, including all the crypto and blockchain types of stuff. So I guess now's a good time to kind of get into what the executive orders are and what they actually

say. Yeah, so these two executive orders were just signed this week. Order 1 launches a national effort to produce a quantum computer capable of performing important scientific calculations. It also aims to develop quantum enabled sensors and networks within the next five years. years. Okay, that seems pretty quick. Order number two directs federal agencies to transition their computer systems to quantum cryptography, post-quantum cryptography standards by 2031, and it positions the U.S. government to lead wider adoption of these stronger security standards

to address future quantum computing threats. That seems conservative. Because at the rate that progress is being made, for them to transition all of their computer systems to cryptographic, resistant quantum by 2031, I don't know. We might get there a little bit beforehand, but those are the two things. It's noteworthy that these are being signed because that means it's at least front of mind for enough people to get these on executive orders, to get these passed, get these bills signed. And I think it signals the fact that this is very real. This is happening. And there's a tremendous amount of progress being made in the space. Now, the last time that the government took such action for a specific technology was AI. And if you remember, it was also followed

very soon after by an actual investment from the government into equity stakes in different companies in AI, right? So they made the Intel investment where they acquired, I think, 10% of the stock or the company itself. They did something similar about three weeks ago when they announced the Chips Act, where they invested $2 billion across nine different quantum-based technology companies. Most of them are private. There's some public. and we'll get into what those companies are. But if I were to zoom out and think, why is the government making this investment now specifically?

I think they've been rattled by the whole AI thing. I think they've seen how quickly AI models are progressing. They've shut down Fable because it can basically access any of their security systems. And they're thinking, hmm, we need to get ahead of this other technology, which could potentially pose an even worse threat. And we're going to be more proactive. We're going to invest in the companies that are actually building this foundational layer before they go public, and we're going to be able to effectively control what they build and how

they build it and get access to the thing before they release it publicly. Now, I'm in two minds about whether this is a good or bad thing. On the good side, I like that, you know, a government is taking an equity stake in the GDP and companies that are prospering, that are innovating in their own domain. But I'm also like, are you trying to nationalize this technology before it even comes to fruition, and I feel like that has bad effects on the whole capitalist side of things. Either way, I think it's cool. I think it's interesting. I think the timelines are a little conservative only because you have AI models now that you could probably chuck at this problem, and it'll accelerate quantum chip development probably pretty rapidly at this point. Yeah, listen, I'm happy for them.

They're buying it early, but I'm interested in how I can buy in early. I think that's what I want to talk about. And to get there, we probably want to start with the big ones, the ones who have solved this problem called fault tolerance. There's this problem with these quantum bits because they don't really exist how you want them. They're very noisy and they're impossible to measure as a result. So therefore you get a lot of noisy results as you test these things. They don't work. There's this thing called fault tolerance where you kind of paired together these noisy cubits and it gives you a local cubit. That local cubit actually reads out what we call fault tolerant outputs. And that is the measurement that these companies are using to determine how powerful their quantum chips are.

The two companies leading this right now are the two you would expect. These are not. anything surprising. This is Google. This is Microsoft. They have been leading the race for a long time. Google has this roadmap on their website, actually, which I thought was phenomenal. And it kind of walks through the progress that they plan to see along with dates that they have. And as we click through these, I mean, milestone three is coming along. It's an order of magnitude improvement. Then milestone four is another order of magnitude. Five and six are also full order of magnitude improvement. So each step of this process that they're planning to do, maybe every couple of years is going to be a full 10x improvement, and the same is true with Microsoft. So those are the

two companies that we know are creating these quantum computers. They are the furthest to head. They have the most resources allocated. That is kind of the top level of the stack. If you go further down the stack, there's another couple of options here. And those use a slightly different way of going about this quantum race. So you could think of it as like three different ways of doing quantum computers. There's the traditional superconduction, which means you require a lot of cooling. That's when you see those crazy big computers, they cool a tiny little chip and it freezes it to the point where it removes all the noise from the system. Then there's a second thing called trapped ions, which is where there is a second set of company. And then the third, which is called neutral atoms.

It gets a little technical there. But let's go into the stack just below Microsoft and Google. Do you have a few options that are there? Yeah, Google and Microsoft have been kind of like forging the path at least publicly for everyone to kind of like see. One thing I couldn't help but notice is the updates that these two companies who are basically leaders in this field at this point have primarily been infrastructure updates. So the updates are like, if you look at the news here

that I'm showing from Microsoft's recent major Rana to quantum chip news, is basically, hey, yeah, we increase the architecture by a thousandfold. And then when you look into like what it actually does, you're like, I don't really know. It's just a cool science experiment that we could run in our lab

and we brought the error rate down and we're like, great. Like, what are we actually using it for? So we dug into what company, are actually one public or two private, but actually building something cool and uniquely available that retail might be able to play around with eventually. And the number one company that came at the top of that list is that age-old company, that age-old computing company called IBM. And the US government- That's crazy. That's a dinosaur. Exactly. And the US government had a

$2 billion investment vehicle, which they dispersed three weeks ago that I mentioned earlier. and 50% of that, $1 billion, went into IBM. So you might be wondering, why on Earth was it going into IBM? Well, IBM has actually been cooking up a quantum product for a while now. It's called IBM Quantum, and it serves over 210 organizations, and then we're working on their qubit chip, essentially, their quantum computer for a while now. They have it in a very basic form. It's not really widely accessible to the public.

But I was wondering, what are they using this for? Well, there's two main applications right now. One is being run by the Cleveland Clinic, and it's being used to simulate a specific type of protein that can treat certain ailments that their patients experience. They're focusing on building a specific protein that is around 300 atoms in size. So we're talking about literally like the most microscopic of microscopic types of molecules. But the idea is it'll form a foundation to build antibodies that they can serve up to their clients. Again, it's nowhere near at the clinical trial level, but it's something that they've been playing around. with, and apparently it's been very useful for them.

The second company is in the complete opposite end of the field, which is HSBC has been running quant algos using their version of a quantum computer, so quantum, there you go, to basically come up with new algorithms for trading. Now, the last time I checked, HSBC hasn't made all the money in the world. They haven't beat Jane Street. They haven't beat Citadel. So I think we're okay for now. But it's interesting to see the other kind of applications and interest that, or rather the variety

that a lot of these companies are experiencing for IBM's products specifically. You've got Mercedes-Benz that's using this. Exxon Mobile, Bosch is using it. So anywhere and anyone across the hardware layer, the hardware stack, whether it's cars, whether it's drills, whether it's motors, whatever that might be, is playing around with this quantum stuff to try and figure out how they could advance their own science and materials technology.

And then the other companies that kind of like top of this list that isn't publicly invested in by the government, but we're spoken about is Google. They've been spending a lot of time working on this. They have their chips. I think Sundar Pitchai last year announced a major breakthrough. And then you have a few other companies which we'll get into now. Okay, so we can help with biology,

but I'm still interested in where it's going to start to break things and destroy things, because it feels like that will be then too large to ignore. And it seems like I have a few numbers that I found during research today, that we need about 4,000 to 6,000 of these bits in order to start actually breaking the standard encryption. And we need even less to break. elliptical curve encryption. Now, you don't need to know what elliptical curve encryption is. All you need to know is that is the encryption that underlines Bitcoin and modern messaging and a lot of that type of encryption. That needs 1,200. The current numbers today, where we're at,

Google Willa, which was announced, I believe, at the end of 2024, early 2025, has 105 of these. IBM has 120 of these scaling very quickly to 360. And when they talk about the way that these systems improve, they are orders of magnitude, they will continue to 10x, which means we are maybe one to two full orders of magnitude away from really having like a pretty significant impact on standard encryption. So we have our biological impact. We have the encryption impact. We also have, I'm sure, a lot of mathematical use cases that we don't understand. Within these companies, there are more that we haven't talked about. The first one is Raghetti, which I actually haven't heard of EGESA. What is Raghetti? And why is it an interesting quantum company? Well, Riggetti is

been around since 2021, and there's actually a really good analogy to explain what they do. So in the AI world, when you create all these chips and you want to serve up this wonderful compute to AI labs, there's this intermediary player that basically helps you do this. And it's a neocloud, or in the traditional sense, it's Amazon Web Services. They run the... No, we have neoclots for quantum. Yep, yep, yep. We have neoclots for quantum.

That's essentially what Rigetti does. And they own the entire stack, which is really interesting and separate from like the typical cloud services. they design the chip and they fab the chip. So as you can see, like a vertically integrated stack like that, it's kind of similar to what Google does with TPUs on the AI chips and then they serve up the actual AI model themselves. That's the equivalent of what Righetti is doing.

But at the very small market cap of $7.1 billion. Now, we were looking at like the stock performance over the last, or over its existence, and it's up 122%. It hasn't been performing too crazy on the news. news. I think like it probably reacted pretty well from the government investment about three weeks ago. But the idea is these companies are entirely small. They haven't proven their ability to scale yet because there is nothing to scale. The major players, Google and Microsoft hasn't actually built something yet that is worth noticing. Now, the second company that I want to speak about that, the government also

put in another $100 million check-in is this company called D-Wave. Now, if we scroll to like the all-time, it's up a similar amount. It's around 141% and it was formed around the same time that Raghetti was as well. Now, the whole form of D-Wave is, okay, so let's say you create this quantum chair and let's say you're an enterprise

that wants to use this thing. You need to heavily optimize everything from the chip to the actual application within your enterprise to make it make sense. The irony is we're seeing the same thing here. You have all these fancy A.m. But all these enterprises are like,

I don't know how to connect this to my team or to my database or to do. do the thing that I wanted to do. That's essentially what D-Wave quantum does. Yeah, I think I want to note something that I see in both of these charts. As you're pulling them up, they were very dormant until when. When does the volume actually start? Like, when does it pick up?

Around the end of 2024. Yeah. And that synchronizes with the announcement of Google Willow, which signal to the world, I believe that quantum computing is serious. They have achieved a, like, a meaningful amount, a triple-digit amount of these fault-tolerant cubits, and there's a clear trajectory to scaling that. And I think that moment in 2024, when you see both of these charts start to move, although it hasn't been unbelievable gains, it's been much different than the dormant four years prior that these companies have been

trading. It feels very much like the early days of AI. And I was just listening to this conversation with Faye Faye Lee. She's one of like the godmothers of AI. She was one of these three critical components that led to current day AI that we have using this thing called ImageNet. And it reminds me very similarly of the story that she was telling, where it was very much a research project for a very long time. And a lot of people didn't take it too seriously. They saw the signs, but they never thought it would work. They thought it would be years, decades away. And the reality is, is that all it took was a single breakthrough with product market fit as it relates to something like chat GPT to really start this race. So it feels to me now like we are in the research and development phase of quantum,

where a lot of these companies are spending lots of money, the government is participating, and they're investing a lot. They're showing some signs of life. These companies are not completely dormant. We have some volume here. It is being traded. And there will be a moment in time in which that switch flips. How long is that going to be? I don't know. But now feels like that early time where, okay, they have 100 this year. Maybe they get a thousand two years from now. Maybe they get 10,000 two years from then. At what point on that scale does it actually start to meaningfully impact the world? And I think it's similar to AI where there will be a moment in which it very much does. Like if they are able to start decrypting the internet, that's like a huge deal.

And there very much should be a race to solve this. And I will assume this will be like a very large government thing because the downstream implications of what these quantum computers can do is huge. So when I see these charts, when I look at these companies, I'm imagining a five to 10 year investment that I'm going to put in to see this thing to be early in the research development and hope that one of these will actually wind up being the core weave neocloud. It will be the, I mean, will the next Google be Google? probably, possibly.

It seems like they're the furthest to head. But that's kind of how I'm looking at this right now. It's like these are research projects that are showing some signs of life and some will win. And the ones that do, it looks like they're going to win pretty big. Yeah, I mean, the coolest part is

you aren't just looking at small random companies that you've never heard of that are working on these technologies. They're important companies. Google and Microsoft are name brands. And the good part is they've been investing in this for well over a decade. And Google, you know,

somehow, to be the first for all of these different technologies. They were essentially the first that invested so much in AI, and they're the same doing it on the quantum side of things as well. So just as like a general basket bet, usually their companies do very well in terms of exposure to these newer technologies. In terms of the convergence of AI and quantum right now

and the government making significant investments in both of these technologies, I don't think it's a coincidence by any chance. If I think about these two technologies, I kind of think about them as very, very rudimentary tools, which you can kind of like wave at any problem, and theoretically, they could fix it. And we're nowhere near that right now, air models hallucinate, they get a lot of things wrong. And then on the quantum side of things, we don't even have anything to use right now.

But the idea is directionally, over that five to ten year times fund that you mentioned, Josh, I believe we'll see these two technologies be the most important and impactful on humanity as a whole. And what that yields, what breakthroughs and innovation, material sciences, molecular compounds that that creates, we don't know yet and we don't need to necessarily know yet, but it's definitely two tracks that we need to pay very close attention to. And I have a feeling, a strong feeling, that both of these technologies will be very heavily intertwined.

If you are an AI model provider and you want a smart computer to kind of like regulate and guide the AI model, quantum computer sounds like it kind of like knows what it's doing, it understands a molecular simulations of a bunch of of how the world works, the physical reality. It's interesting. You mentioned Faye Faye Lee. She's building an amazing world model, which I believe is going to be the next iteration of AI models.

What's one great unlock about a world model? It understands physical reality. It gives the LLM an understanding of how the world actually works, sees and feels through the human kind of set of sensors. And I believe quantum computers could potentially be that to AI models. Now, a lot of that is hearsay. Right now, I have no proof for all of this. I'm not a quantum expert.

but it feels generally that's where the world is taking a step towards. Yeah, and in terms of tangible timelines, we have today, we have dozens to 100 cubits. By 2027 to 29, the expectation is to get hundreds of these. And then by the early 30s, the expectation is for thousands of these. And those definitions and the timelines, as we know, they get very fuzzy. Like you mentioned, AI is very closely intertwined. A lot of these things kind of converge on themselves. They speed up expectations.

And we know this. seen this before where we, we, everyone was like, no, AGI isn't going to come for decades. And like, here we are right on the doorstep. So the estimates have been a little weird. Back in 2019, it was estimated that it would take about 20 million cubits to break the popular encryption RSA 2048 that the internet runs on. And it would take a couple hours. By last year, a Google researcher showed that it could be done with under one million cubits and under a week. And then new error correction schemes are probably going to push that number even lower. So we're getting this accelerated rate of progress that I think we saw in AI. And that's

going to push things in a really interesting place and maybe cause a little bit of panic because the downstream implications of this are huge. But I think that is, that's the update. That is the all-encompassing kind of state of the union on quantum as it relates to just the companies involved and how to invest in them. Thankfully, a lot of them are public. Thankfully, a lot of them are not even trading that high. I'm not sure if they will for quite some time, but those are the players to look out for. Those are the companies that the government is investing in. Those are the companies that are showing signs of life on the chart for the first time in history. And those are the companies that are seeding the roots to this new exponential growth curve that we have in the world of quantum. It's much

earlier than something like AI, but I imagine we'll see a very similar trajectory. And that's something excited to be in. So personally, I'm, I mean, I'm not in any quantum exposure right now. Maybe I should. I mean, I guess Google counts technically. But what do you think, Ejazz? Is this something you're interested in? So one, yes, something I'm interested in, but only to the sense where It's like a decade hold at this point. The other thing I really wanted to say is it's kind of nice that a lot of these companies that were invested in are essentially public. There's a bunch of private companies, but IBM's been around for a while.

And also these other small cap companies like Rgetti and D-Wave, which, by the way, I'm not recommending investing at all. I own nothing in it. Disclaimer, this is not investment advice. It's just interesting to see that they are publicly available for the retail to get access to if they believe in this thesis and if they believe those companies are going to be able to fulfill the vision

that we kind of laid out on this episode. With all of that being said, I'll have a small bag in quantum. I do believe, I've been bullish on it for a while now, but to be honest, like, one, a lot of the technology itself kind of escapes me. I need to do a lot more learning. And two, I think AI is still going to be the focus

for a while now, but that's where the asymmetry when it comes to investing kind of lies at the moment. But I believe that is it for this episode. That's the quantum episode. If I had one single prompt for the audience, it would be, if you're one of the 210 organizations that are working with IBM on their quantum product, what are you doing with it?

Like, or if you know something about this that we haven't mentioned on the show, I would love to hear more about what you guys are kind of like thinking about how these quantum computers will be applied, because right now it's not too clear. And maybe that's just the simple answer at this point. As always, thank you guys so much for watching. If you enjoy this episode, please don't forget to share it with a friend who you think might also enjoy. We are also looking for sponsors if anyone wants to support the show.

If you want to contribute to the balance sheet of limit list that allows us to keep the lights on and do this show forever, that would be very much appreciated. We have gone very long time without interrupting the content with ads. It is time that we're going to need to include just a little bit. So if you know anyone, if you have anyone, if you are someone who is interested in supporting the show, we are all ears. You know how to access us on Twitter. You can message in the comments below, whatever it may be. Just reach out and let us know. We appreciate it.

But as always, thank you so much for watching. and we will see you guys in the next episode.