EP. 113 | Quantum, Hacks, and Privacy: Inside Blockchain Security with Penn's Brett Falk

<p>If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer came online tomorrow, every token on every blockchain would be a target — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana all share signature schemes that pre-date the post-quantum era. The math has been clear since the 1990s. What&#39;s been missing is the machine. That uncomfortable truth anchors this week&#39;s TRM Talks.</p><p>Brett Falk, research faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Crypto and Society Lab, joins Ari to work through what that actually means — why Shor&#39;s algorithm threatens every chain, what NIST&#39;s 2024 post-quantum standards mean in practice, and why Ethereum is better positioned than Bitcoin to respond. They also dig into the back-to-back Drift and Kelp DAO exploits and what made the DPRK playbook behind them unlike anything we&#39;ve seen before, and into the cryptographic tools — zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, credential-based KYC — that let users prove compliance without turning every business into a ransomware target. The math to thread that needle already exists.</p>