What happened
DAC Head of Innovation Davide Costa joined panel discussions on quantum computing and blockchain security at the Digital Innovation Forum 2026, held in Italy on Thursday. BeInCrypto reported the appearance was timed deliberately: Italy is weeks away from unveiling its first Quantum Supercomputer, a milestone the government is treating as a strategic industrial moment rather than a research footnote.
DAC itself is a Layer-1 blockchain project built with post-quantum cryptography at the protocol level. The company's message at the forum was blunt. Chains that still lean on ECDSA signatures, which covers Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most of the top 50 by market cap, will eventually face a cryptographic cliff when sufficiently capable quantum hardware comes online. Costa's framing, per the BeInCrypto report, was that the industry cannot wait for that moment to start migrating.
Why it matters
Quantum risk has lived on the far edge of crypto's threat model for a decade. It's starting to move closer. Italy's supercomputer is not a laboratory curiosity. It's a national asset with industrial customers, which means the conversation shifts from academic papers to procurement contracts and compliance roadmaps.
For blockchain protocols, the uncomfortable truth is that migration is not a software patch. Changing signature schemes on a live chain with billions in locked value is a years-long governance exercise, as the Bitcoin and Ethereum research communities have both acknowledged in ongoing working groups. DAC's pitch is that starting fresh with lattice-based or hash-based signatures is cleaner than retrofitting.