Zero-Knowledge in 2026: Ethereum Blocks Proven in 3 Seconds for a Third of a Cent, a 52-Bit Security Gap, and Google Wallet Proving Your Age
Where zero-knowledge proofs actually stand: the Ethereum Foundation's real-time proving definition and the measured numbers on ethproofs (from 16 minutes and $1.69 to 3 seconds and $0.003 a block on consumer GPUs), why the security certification is the hard part (a 52-bit gap between the proven and claimed soundness of the hash used), the zkVM bugs fuzzers found this year, the L2 landscape at $43 billion with zero Stage 2 rollups, and the non-crypto uses shipping now: Google Wallet's ZK age proofs, the EU wallet's December deadline, zkML and zkTLS. Plus a proof you can generate on a laptop.
14 minSep 7, 2026Quantum Hardware in 2026: Below Threshold, Not Yet Useful, and the Estimates That Fell 200x
Google is below the surface-code threshold, Quantinuum is public, IBM claims advantage three times in one day, and the qubit count needed to break RSA-2048 dropped from 20 million to under 100,000 on paper. What a systems engineer should take from all of it, with a runnable error-correction simulation.
15 minSep 6, 2026Post-Quantum Migration in 2026: What's Done, What's Stuck, and What to Do This Quarter
Two-thirds of browser traffic to Cloudflare is already post-quantum. Your SSH is too. Your certificates are not, and won't be until 2027. A field guide for infrastructure engineers, with verified commands and hard deadlines.
13 min