Today in crypto, S&P Dow Jones Indices has tokenized its iBoxx US Treasuries Index on the Canton Network, making a major fixed-income benchmark available as a digital asset, Russia approved a draft crypto bill package that would push trading through licensed intermediaries and cap retail purchases at $3,700 annually, and new research from Google found that quantum computers might require far fewer resources than previously thought to break cryptography.
Wall Street moves benchmarks onchain as S&P tokenizes Treasurys index
S&P Dow Jones Indices has tokenized its iBoxx US Treasuries Index on the Canton Network, making a major fixed-income benchmark available as a digital asset and signaling a shift toward onchain data infrastructure in traditional finance.
In a Tuesday announcement, S&P said the index was brought onchain together with Kaiko, a provider of digital asset market data and infrastructure that supports the tokenization and onchain delivery of the index.
The iBoxx US Treasuries Index is a widely used benchmark that tracks the performance of US government bonds across different maturities, serving as a reference point for institutional investors and fixed-income products.
The tokenized index is not an investable product. Instead, it’s designed for financial institutions building digital products, allowing them to integrate benchmark data, including pricing and index levels, directly into blockchain systems.
Russia moves to narrow crypto trading to regulated intermediaries
Russia’s government has approved a package of draft bills that would channel domestic crypto trading through licensed intermediaries and sharply limit retail access.
The Finance Ministry said Monday that the government had approved a package of draft bills on the legalization of the circulation of digital currencies and digital rights in Russia.
“Under the new regulatory framework, transactions involving digital currency without regulated intermediaries are prohibited,” the ministry said. The package would tighten state oversight of digital assets while preserving limited access for non-qualified investors and broader access for qualified investors.
The framework introduces significant limits for retail investors, allowing purchases of the “most liquid digital currencies” to be defined by the Bank of Russia. Under the rules, retail investors must pass a test and are limited to purchases of up to 300,000 rubles ($3,700) per year through a single intermediary.
The proposal would still allow residents to buy crypto abroad using foreign accounts, provided those transactions are reported to tax authorities, signaling that Moscow is trying to domesticate crypto trading rather than ban it outright.
Quantum computers need far less qubits to crack crypto than thought: Google
New research from Google shows that quantum computers could require far less resources than previously thought to break the cryptography that secures cryptocurrency blockchains.
Google’s new research, released on Monday, estimates a quantum computer could crack the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum using fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, based on its current assumptions about hardware capabilities. A qubit is the basic unit of a quantum computer.
The researchers compiled two quantum circuits to test on a superconducting-qubit, cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC), reporting that it was a “20-fold reduction” in the number of qubits required to break the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP-256) widely used in cryptocurrency blockchains.
The research suggests that in a theoretical scenario, a quantum computer could crack a Bitcoin private key in as little as nine minutes, giving it a small window to perform an “on-spend attack” given Bitcoin’s 10-minute block time.
