Seattle-based Interlune says it has managed to produce 99% pure helium-3 from a standard supply of industrial-grade helium, marking a milestone for a technology that the company aims to use on the moon.
The process, known as Cold Capture, could be profitably used on Earth even before Interlune begins lunar mining operations.
Only 0.000137% of the world’s helium exists in the form of helium-3, as opposed to the much more common helium-4 isotope. But helium-3 is uniquely suited for use as a refrigerant for quantum computers. It can also be used in radiation detectors, medical scanners and eventually fusion reactors.
Because of its rarity and utility, the price of helium-3 can range as high as $20 million per kilogram ($9 million per pound). Interlune is betting on the proposition that helium-3 is more abundant and easier to access on the moon, due to the lunar surface’s exposure to the solar wind. If Interlune’s business model works out, the company will be able to turn a profit by delivering lunar helium-3 to Earth for industrial applications.
Interlune’s first objective was to show that Cold Capture could work as advertised. The process uses cryogenic distillation to separate helium-3 from ordinary helium at temperatures approaching absolute zero.
“Capturing helium-3 from existing helium sounds deceptively simple,” Gary Lai, Interlune’s chief technology officer, said in a news release. “But helium-3 and ordinary helium are almost chemically identical, making them extraordinarily difficult to separate. Cold Capture exploits subtle physical differences between the two isotopes at cryogenic temperatures to recover helium-3 in a process designed to scale.”
Interlune demonstrated Cold Capture at a small scale in early 2025, and received a $1.25 million small-business grant from the Department of the Air Force last November to scale up the technology for commercial production.
Based on the experiments conducted since then, Interlune projects that its technology could triple the current domestic production rate of helium-3.
“Every liter of helium produced in the world contains trace amounts of helium-3,” said Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune. “Cold Capture plugs into existing helium liquefaction plant infrastructure to recover that helium-3 and turn it into a valuable product.”
Interlune has already struck deals with the U.S. Department of Energy and Maybell Quantum to deliver shipments of helium-3. The first shipments are likely to come from terrestrial sources of helium, courtesy of Cold Capture.
Meanwhile, the company is following a step-by-step plan for lunar prospecting and production. A camera designed to estimate lunar levels of helium-3 is due for delivery to the moon late this year aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander.
That mission, known as Crescent Moon, is expected to open the way for a NASA-supported experiment called Prospect Moon in 2028. The experiment will test methods to extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks.
Follow-up missions could focus on harvesting hydrogen for rocket fuel and other lunar power applications, while also collecting helium-3 for delivery to Earth.
Interlune was founded in 2020 and reported raising $18 million in seed capital in 2024. This January, the company announced an additional $5 million investment offering aimed at advancing key technical milestones.
Bitcoin Magazine
Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat
Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative today, a program that commits up to $5 million in developer grants, a research effort, and a new advisory council to harden the network against the arrival of powerful quantum computers.
The Nasdaq-listed firm framed the multi-pillar effort as an attempt to close a gap between two worlds moving at different speeds.
“There’s a gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and the Bitcoin development world, which is just beginning to engage with post-quantum cryptography in earnest,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy, whose team has tracked the threat for Wall Street and cast it as a long-term engineering problem rather than a crisis.
Bitcoin’s security rests on elliptic curve cryptography, a scheme that a machine running Shor’s algorithm could break by deriving a private key from an exposed public key.
An attacker with such a tool could forge a signature and drain a wallet, with nothing on-chain to flag the theft. No such computer exists today, yet the estimated timeline for one keeps compressing, a trend the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned narrows the window for the network to upgrade.
The grant program forms the first pillar. Galaxy said it would fund work on quantum-resistant transaction proposals, the integration of post-quantum signature schemes, tooling for wallet and custodian migration, and formal security audits of proposed code.
Grants will be judged one at a time and paid on a milestone basis, and the firm expects to open applications without delay through the address quantum@galaxy.com.
A research and publishing arm forms the second pillar, with Galaxy Research set to publish analysis of the threat and the developer response for investors, policymakers, and the technical community.
The third pillar is a Quantum Advisory Council that will guide the research and weigh grant proposals. Its first members are Barry Sanders, professor and scientific director of Quantum City at the University of Calgary; Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss Fellow; and Eran Tromer, a professor of computer science at Boston University.
“As leaders in the digital assets space, we believe it’s important that we help be part of the solution to any potential threat quantum computing poses to Bitcoin,” said Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy, a figure known for bold price calls on bitcoin. Sanders said quantum timelines “continue to compress” and that bitcoin should be no exception to the preparation underway across governments and industries.
Old and reused addresses face the sharpest risk, since their public keys sit exposed on the ledger. An estimated 1.7 million BTC rest in legacy pay-to-public-key addresses, a stash with keys on permanent display.
Defenses under review center on migration to quantum-resistant address types and new signature schemes, an approach embodied in BIP-360, a proposal from developer Hunter Beast that removes public-key exposure from standard transactions.
That proposal merged into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository this year, and BTQ Technologies deployed a working implementation on a quantum testnet.
Bitcoin’s decentralized governance turns such changes into a slow process of design, review, testing, and deployment that can span years. Some observers cast that structure as the true obstacle, a governance challenge as much as a cryptographic one, and the pool of developers on the problem stays small next to its scale.
The launch lands in an active warning cycle. Galaxy Research has held that the risk is real yet the countermeasures are advancing, and President Trump signed executive orders that advance U.S. quantum work and set a 2031 federal deadline for post-quantum defense. NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024.
Galaxy said it welcomes co-funders and other stakeholders, and acknowledged that peers may pledge their own funds toward the same goal. The firm cast that prospect as a benefit rather than a rivalry, with an open invitation to institutions and developers who want to join.
This post Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states needed to perform universal computation on those logical qubits. But there are also many less prominent challenges that will need to be solved before we can perform calculations.
One of those challenges, which only affects some types of hardware, is calibration. For devices we manufacture, like superconducting qubits, there are always subtle variations among individual qubits. (This is not true when we use something like an atom to hold the qubit, but the lasers that control them can drift.) As a result, this hardware is put through a process called calibration, where we test different frequencies and amplitudes of the microwave pulses that control them to find the combination that produces the lowest error rates, and then save those settings for use in calculations.
However, you can't perform the typical calibration process while you're doing calculations, which means drift becomes an issue for long and complicated algorithms. Google, though, has figured out that it's possible to do calibration using the same data that's used for error correction.
A central problem with the arguably overhyped field of quantum computing remains the difficulty in objectively ascertaining performance and new developments, as much here relies on indirect measurements. Such is especially the case with topological quantum computing, with its use of Majorana fermions. For a few years now Microsoft’s quantum computing department (Azure Quantum) has made claims here of major progress, which have subsequently repeatedly been shot down in peer review. Their most recent attempt at said progress in topological quantum computing now got a blistering response (PDF) by Henry F. Legg in an article in Nature.
We previously reported on Microsoft’s attempts here in early 2025, when they claimed the detection of the crucial Majorana Zero Mode (MZM), before it faced the criticisms of peer review, including by Legg, which included academically vicious language by some researchers, including terms like ‘essentially fraudulent’.
This raises the awkward question of whether Microsoft’s quantum researchers are just too eager to confirm a discovery, or whether a more benign reason exists.
In traditional quantum computing generally Dirac fermions are used as the qubits for quantum computations, but so far this approach has been fraught with complications and challenges, with decoherence and noise intrusion making long-running computations extremely hard and necessitating the need to run computations multiple times for error-correction algorithms to have a shot at divining a plausible result.
This is where topological quantum computing comes into play, as although it imposes some limitations on its feature set, it would be much more resilient to outside influences. Some confusion here may exist with the referencing of Majorana particles, as fermions come in Dirac, Majorana and Weyl flavors. What is referenced here is actually a Majorana anyon, a quasiparticle that just happens to have the same property as Majorana fermions of being its own antiparticle.
By combining these anyons with braid theory using the intertwining of the anyon world lines it becomes possible to perform operations, which theoretically can be used to create a topological quantum computer.
Essentially, this swaps the very fickle, trapped quantum particles for significantly more stable braided Majorana anyons, which – if confirmed – could herald a significant breakthrough in the world of quantum computing.
Even if you have created a device that theoretically should create Majorana anyons, the next challenge is to confirm that this is in fact the case. This, roughly speaking, is the challenging point where Microsoft’s attempts the past years have repeatedly ending up beaching themselves. As mentioned earlier, the evidence here is determined indirectly rather than through simple direct measurements or experiments.
When the first semiconductor transistor was demonstrated at Bell Laboratories in 1947 in the form of the world’s first point-contact transistor, it came after many years of theorizing and failed attempts starting in at least the 1920s.
Here the evidence of a working transistor was impossible to ignore, as it obviously worked as an amplifier of current, with even the simple current- and voltage-measuring devices of the era sufficing to establish the simple truth. Subsequently this design was commercialized before eventually being replaced with the bipolar junction transistor and a flurry of other devices that followed once the basic principles had been demonstrated.
In the case of quantum processors, whether traditional or topological, there is no obvious way to replicate such a basic demonstration at this point in time. Even the far more basic case of quantum annealing in the form of D-Wave’s commercial offerings is mired in controversy whether there is any ‘quantum advantage’ to be found here. This is territory where even mighty IBM has seen its quantum advantage claims trolled and outperformed by researchers using a lowly Commodore 64.
Where it concerns Majorana anyons and evidence of MZM, you can of course try to build a finished device that demonstrates a clear quantum advantage, or you can build a more limited device where you deduce the existence of these fundamental elements based on what remain mostly theoretical assumptions.
For its most recent attempt at proving that they had succeeded at creating these anyons and with it topological superconductors, Microsoft’s team used a new procedure they called the Topological Gap Protocol (TGP), which purportedly was able to perform a parity readout from their manufactured devices and use this to prove that they had really achieved their goal this time.
Consequently, Legg’s most recent critique comes as response to Microsoft Azure Quantum’s paper in Nature which got published as a result of that new approach. In this paper it’s claimed that this time they really did detect topological qubits in this improved test setup with TGP, based on – again – indirect measurements and analysis of recorded data. In Legg’s critique it is this analysis of the measurements that’s being attacked as having been performed incorrectly.
The main issue that he identifies is a selective interpretation of the measurements, focusing on the data that supports the experiment’s assumptions, in what would essentially be confirmation bias. There’s also the argument that Microsoft’s researchers made a number of mistakes in their Python code, where they use the array index rather than its value. After adjusting for said basic Python errors, Legg then got entirely different results based on the same measurements.
As noted by Legg, you can get very similar data signatures from sources like quantum dots. Along with the somewhat fundamental data processing issues, this obviously puts into question just how close the Microsoft team was to actually having created these topological qubits.
Of course, Microsoft’s team got in their reply (paywalled) after taking that broadside salvo. Their main arguments seem to be that TGP has no role in interpreting the RF results – being just a tune-up procedure – that form the basis of the original conclusions, nor do they recognize the issues with TGP that Legg indicated as being valid.
Another point is that Legg offers no alternative physical model that is capable of reproducing the capacitance signal or the RTS phenomenology, and thus the response basically seems to boil down to a curt ‘nuh uh’.
They did acknowledge an off-by-one pixel bug in the TGP processing, but insist that it is only a minor issue.
Effectively, the criticism is rejected, with the original 2025 paper maintained as being valid. This would mean that these topological qubits were truly detected, and with this knowledge a functional topological quantum processor could be constructed and integrated into a larger system.
As much as academics and science in general can often appear to resemble a shooting gallery where the parties involved are happy to do some sniping, ultimately the scientific method has to prevail. This means the publishing of results, of experimental setups and methods with sufficient details that other researchers can attempt to reproduce the results from fundamentals.
If the Microsoft researchers are correct, then this might be a point-contact transistor moment within the world of quantum computing, which would naturally quickly be confirmed by other teams who would create their own devices and run their own tests, making it a historical fact.
Of course, just in the past few years we saw the Korean LK-99 room temperature superconductor and the controversial EmDrive meet a dismal end at the uncaring hands of peer review, while cold fusion is clinging on in a continuous state of limbo, even as it’s now called ‘low-energy nuclear reactions’.
Perhaps the best part of science is that even if nothing comes out of a research direction, it still offers a fascinating opportunity to learn more about physics, mathematics and so much more. Just in the course of writing this article I had to expand my knowledge of some subjects and refresh it on others. Ultimately this makes even something as controversial as topological quantum computing such a delightful topic to occasionally dive into.
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