Quantum mechanics took 27 years (1900–1927) to produce the hardware civilization. The same physics now threatens its cryptographic layer. Three papers published between May 2025 and March 2026 compressed the qubit estimate to break ECDSA/secp256k1 from 20 million to 500,000 — a 20x drop in under a year. NIST finalized post-quantum standards (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) in August 2024, but migration in Web3 is architecturally harder than in traditional systems: private keys don't rotate, deployed sm...