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Circle warns USDC’s quantum migration depends on weakest links

Circle says USDC was worth about $73.6 billion as of Sept. 2, making coordination across host chains, wallets, custodians, and bridges a major security and uptime challenge for the migration.

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Circle has issued a warning that the security of USDC’s planned quantum migration depends on the weakest part of the ecosystem, including host chains, wallets, custodians, bridges, and user accounts that will need to adopt a safer transaction authorization method.

In its Aug. 31 disclosure, Circle told developers to inventory their cryptography, identify vendor dependencies, and prepare key rotation, but noted it cannot unilaterally change signature rules across networks such as Ethereum, Solana, or XRPL, nor can it rotate customers’ private keys or rewrite third-party signing stacks.

Circle’s materials cite a low-width quantum-circuit record of 813 logical qubits from ECDSA.fail as evidence that quantum circuit designs are getting more resource efficient, while also emphasizing the figure can be easy to misread because it alone does not describe full attack requirements such as circuit depth, error correction overhead, or real-world execution time.

Circle added that a migration that secures only its own keys while leaving older wallet, bridge, or base-layer paths exposed would not secure the full USDC footprint, and it highlighted that USDC’s scale underscores the need for broad coordination, with the token valued at about $73.6 billion on Sept. 2.

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