Majorana qubits have been the holy grail of quantum computing for two decades — particles that split quantum information across two points in space, making them inherently resistant to the noise that plagues every other qubit design. Microsoft bet their entire quantum strategy on them. The problem? Nobody could actually read the information stored in them, because the same non-local property that makes them stable makes them invisible to standard sensors. On February 11th, 2026, researchers at QuTech (Delft University of Technology) published a paper in Nature showing they’ve cracked single-shot, real-time readout of Majorana modes using quantum capacitance measurement.
The team built a minimal Kitaev chain — two semiconductor quantum dots coupled through a superconductor — and connected an RF resonator to measure the entire system’s response rather than poking at individual points. Conventional charge sensors saw nothing. The quantum capacitance probe clearly distinguished between the qubit’s zero and one states, with parity coherence times exceeding one millisecond — a thousand times longer than typical superconducting qubits need for error correction. This validates Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip approach from an independent academic team using a completely different fabrication method.
The same week brought another quantum milestone. Pan Jianwei’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China published in Science demonstrating device-independent quantum key distribution over 100 kilometers of optical fiber — orders of magnitude beyond the previous lab-scale record. Device-independent means the security comes purely from the laws of quantum physics, not from trusting the hardware. Even if an adversary built your equipment, the Bell inequality violations mathematically guarantee the encryption key is secure.
These two breakthroughs are building the weapon and the shield simultaneously. Majorana qubits could give us stable, million-qubit quantum computers capable of breaking today’s encryption. Device-independent quantum key distribution protects against exactly that threat — not with harder math problems, but with the fundamental structure of reality. The pieces of the quantum future are falling into place faster than most people expected.