What comes back to you is a certificate that effectively says, "You are at the authentic Amazon website." So that's link in the chain number one. The problem is that certificate system has weaknesses. Those certificates can be spoofed. If Amazon, for whatever reason, fails to renew its certificate, suddenly its certificate is invalid. Sometimes you'll try and go to a website, and boom, up it pops and says, "Can't reach that site." Well, that could be because they didn't renew their certificate. But that's one link in the chain that's weak today. The other link in the chain is after you've authenticated that Amazon is actually the website at which you've arrived, then what occurs is, between a public key and a private key, some mathematics. It's the factorization of long prime numbers, is how they create the encryption link between you and Amazon, okay? That's mathematics, mechanical.
What is a quantum computer very good at? Mathematics. A quantum computer can reverse engineer that factorization and can break your encryption. So really the question is, well, when is a quantum computer showing up? And that question remains open-ended. Anyone you talk to has an opinion. It could be two years, three years, five years, seven years. But the problem that people aren't recognizing, and I say this when I speak to people one-on-one, is what malicious actors are doing is hoovering up all the data they can get their hands on today, encrypted or unencrypted. Specifically, China, who is spending 10-15 times the amount of money on developing its quantum computer than any other country in the world.
They're hoovering up all this data, putting it in a data lake, and when their quantum computer is ready, they're gonna point it at the data lake, and they're gonna see what is in that data lake. And so if you have any information that has shelf life, anything of value, they're gonna be able to see it. So while today you might not feel the imperative to upgrade your cryptography to secure your data, the problem is that information is gonna be available once that quantum computer in China is of scale. So people should be thinking about that today. Who's thinking about it today? Well, I'm not gonna read all this on the, on the page, but the most important thing is the White House came out with a memorandum basically saying whole of government needs to upgrade its encryption standards.
The NSA came out in support of that. And what have they said is the architecture that they prefer? They don't prefer asymmetric encryption. What does the government use? It uses something called symmetric encryption, okay? Symmetric encryption, very simply, is the gold standard of encryption. It's not predicated on math. Basically, Alex and I each have the same long, random number, 256 bits. Only he knows it, only I know it. No one else knows it. If we know it, we can create an encryption key between ourselves that's unbreakable. A quantum computer can look at it. There's no math to reverse engineer. It has to figure out all the combinations of a 2 56 bit long number to decipher the essence of our encryption key. That's what the NSA uses. That's what our military uses.
That's what, like, a Citibank uses. But how does that work? Basically, it's a man or woman with a thumb drive, flies to his location, injects a bucket of long, random numbers into his server, flies to my location, injects the same long, random numbers into mine. Now, we have identical pools of random numbers that we can use to create encryption channels. Highly secure, but not a scalable business model. So what we, a nd as I said, no math involved. That's the key thing to remember. What we have created is a globally scalable, symmetric encryption platform, such that you, in the moment you need it, Alex and I can create symmetric encryption keys to be able to encrypt our communication. That's the key thing to remember, is that's what we do. We're unique in this ability, and we have an extensive patent portfolio which protects our IP.
So we're. We love our position. I can go into how it works, but suffice it to say, because I could waste the rest of this conversation on it, suffice it to say, at no point in the architecture is there an exchange of any numbers or information that someone can break to figure out the key that was created. You would have to ultimately end up controlling all of the points in the architecture to be able to figure it out. We do not share keys at any time during the architectural creation of the key for Alex and I. So the other thing to note is our architecture, our symmetric key architecture, is standards compliant, so we are compliant with today's IT infrastructure.
AES 256 is sort of the, I don't want to say state-of-the-art, but it's the state, current state of development. We sock it right into it, so no new standards need to be created to use our form of encryption, which is very, very important. We meet the NSA's standards to participate in their Commercial for Classified program, which is very important. And again, we comply with what the White House thinks is the preferred approach to future-proofing encryption. Couple things: we're focused right now on two pieces of the ecosystem. We're focused on Network Secure. What that means is securing any data links, simple as that, right? And that can be firewalls, that can be servers, et cetera. We have OEM partners with Juniper, Fortinet, HP, Intel, and I'll go into that in a minute, and also distribution partners, value-added resellers.
We also have developed a product called Trade Secure. Legislation has been passed that allows trade finance documents to actually be digital. It's amazing to think in this day and age that trade finance documents are still paper-based, and it's been that way time immemorial. So legislation's been passed in the U.K., and it's been adopted by a number of other countries, and the reason the U.K. is important is all trade finance law has been predicated on English law. So the U.K. was the first to adopt digital trade finance documents, but they need to be secure. We are the only system that meets the security requirements of this trade finance legislation. We have developed relationships with several trade finance platforms and also financiers. And as a result, we're expecting to do the first trade finance transaction that's digitally documented based. So that's coming soon.
So really focused on securing communication, but also being able, in the case of trade finance, to secure the documentation. What are the benefits of our product? One, it's enhanced security today. As I said, remember the data lake idea. Number two, it's safe in the future. Immediately deployable. We're here. The product is ready. We have customers using it, and I'll talk a little bit more about that, and ultimately, the most important is standards compliant. So it's ready to go today in today's IT environment. I'm not gonna spend much time on this, but we can sell the product as a multi-tenanted platform, as a service, which is cloud-based, but there are also gonna be, in the case, particularly of government customers, who want to run their own private instance. They want to control the software.
They don't want to be going out to a cloud to be able to create keys. Only reason I have this page here, 'cause no one's gonna read it, is all of these partners have beta tested, done proof of concepts, you know, poked, prodded at the product, and like it to the point that they've adopted it either into their own products. Juniper and Fortinet, we didn't pay them to incorporate our technology into their firewalls. They did it of their own volition. We didn't pay a dime. Same with Intel, same with Dell. Likewise, distributors, value-added resellers see this as a incremental revenue opportunity for them.
Every time their salesman goes in and is selling a Juniper firewall, they can say, "Hey, by the way, for a 5%-10% upsell, how'd you like to be quantum safe?" So people see this as an opportunity to drive incremental revenue for themselves or customer retention. What's very important is we're starting to finally see inbound momentum. Instead of us going out and proselytizing the world, we're starting to see inbound momentum. And I'm gonna point to the two things on the right side of the page. Earlier in the year, in April, Intel did a white paper testing our solution and basically said very glowing things in this white paper they published. And then they said they're going to embed our encryption solution onto their next generation of Xeon processors that go into servers.
Essentially, if you buy a server, you would be able to enable our encryption architecture, really, on, you know, for lack of a better term, with a flip of a switch. I use the analogy, when you buy a new laptop, you open it up, up pops McAfee, and it says, "Hey, for $30, swipe your credit card. You now have antivirus," et cetera. Same type of sell-through. Sparkle came out of Telecom Italia. It's their global, you know, formerly global fiber operator. It's its own business now, 600,000 kilometers of fiber around the world. They did a test of our product between Sicily and Frankfurt. Loved the security of it. They, you know, came out with this press release saying, "We've tested the first quantum-safe fiber network." That's great.
We love that, when people see the efficacy of our product and want to talk about it. Well, what has happened is essentially Intel and Sparkle have married up, and earlier in August, Sparkle came out with this press release, basically saying, "We can now offer our customers Network as a Service, Quantum Safe Network as a Service." And what it does is it incorporates their network, Intel server, and our security in all one packaged offering. So if you're a global customer for TI Sparkle or for Sparkle, you can basically just upgrade, and so your connectivity from, let's say, New York to Rome or New York to Frankfurt, is now quantum safe. And for us, it's great because we don't have to go out and sell to the end user.
Sparkle will pay us licensing fees based upon the number of POPs we're installed in or the number of end users that are selecting Arqit's product. So being able to sell through these leading IT providers is a much better way for us to go to market. So we're very excited about it. And look, there's no denying we are early days, but we are now seeing ecosystems developing. We're starting to see inbounds. You know, Sparkle is just the first telecom operator. We're doing proof of concepts with a handful of additional global telecom operators. We're also well, we finished a proof of concept with a U.S., major U.S. 5G network infrastructure company, and that's moving to the next phase of business relationship.
So we're starting to see that momentum building, and we expect that, you know, FY25 , which starts October first for us, we're expecting that to be meaningfully more revenue than we've experienced in the past, as a result. And we're hopeful if a couple things break before the end of the month to go into the next fiscal year with some backlog, which, you know, for us, that's a first. And so we're, you know, very excited. But as I said, a couple things that are, you know, on the goal line just need to fall into the end zone for us. So we're working hard. You know, these are the key takeaways. You know, market need is evident.
We're unique in that we've got an independent security proof of our product, but we also have the validation of the security review that all these other companies have done before they integrate us into their tech. No one's gonna put us into their firewall unless they've thoroughly vetted it, right? Fortinet, Juniper, don't wanna go sell you a firewall saying it's quantum safe, and then tomorrow they discover, "Oops, sorry, guys," you know. I'll give you a year of LifeLock to make up for it. We now have a go-to-market established through these leading IT vendors, which is very important because we started our journey trying to knock on doors and selling directly and realized that's just an uphill fight, and we didn't have the wherewithal to do that.
We're starting to see the adoption and coming slower, but, you know, we announced that there was a seven-figure contract out of the Middle East that would close this year, or this fiscal year. And that's super close, and that's really what we think the equity markets is looking for, to get that one done, so that finally the equity market can go, "Aha, someone's paying real money for the product." And that, to me, is gonna be the watershed moment for us. Competition, yes, there's competition from enhanced PKI. They've run a competition to develop, you know, heavier math, public key infrastructure. The problem is, it's not necessarily compliant with today's standards, so there would have to be an, you know, enhancement to today's standards to adopt it.
And number two, and this is not an insignificant matter, by beefing up the math, you're making it computationally heavy, which puts a lot of burden on CPUs, batteries, et cetera, and in fact, it may be too heavy for certain smaller devices. So that could be a problem. And, there is one small company out there that claims it has a similar architecture to ours. A, we don't believe it, B, it's very nascent, and C, we hope they've tripped one of our patents because we've got a very extensive patent portfolio and, you know, my general counsel's chomping at the bit to have a go at them. So that's where we are. We're unique, standards-based, and we're starting to see some traction in the go-to-market. So with that, I'll pause. Happy to take any questions.
I can get as technical as you want or not, but I just open the floor to whomever.
Thank you, Tracy. Yep. Go. Yeah, just a quick question. As far as technology goes, I asked an earlier presenter in cybersecurity who were claiming that their encryption method is quantum safe, and they said they're just increasing, I believe, just the amount of bits. So, meaning, like, going from 256 to something.
Yeah. Yeah, that's.
Is that enough to kinda.
The issue very simply is, so long as it's math-based, a quantum computer is gonna break it, right? It's just a question of, is it minutes, hours, days, right? Because if there's one thing and one thing only a quantum computer is good at, it's math. And that's it. It's like taking a padlock, right? And the bolt cutter today can't cut through it. Oh, new bolt cutter, it can cut through it. So what I'll do is I'll make the metal thicker. Well, along comes the bigger bolt cutter. Right? That's the issue. So I would love to hear what they're saying, but we think anything that's using PKI is at risk.
How do you generate the random keys?
Okay. Yep. All right, he wanted to go there, so let's go there. Okay. So even though there's three corners to this triangle, it's really four. So two data centers, two endpoints. We distribute to each of those data centers big buckets of long, random numbers. Then each endpoint downloads our light software agent, okay? So it's really like a four corners offense. Anyone play basketball? Right. Four corners offense. Each of the.
That initial list, do you use an actual quantum computer?
No
Qubits to come up.
Nope
Initial random numbers?
No, you can use a random number generator located in data centers. That's one way to do it. Or you can deliver HSMs, Hardware Security Modules, with that big bucket on them. So there are multiple ways to get those buckets to the data center securely. That's not the weak link. So someone effectively would need to control all four corners of the architecture to really break it, and that's you know. If someone is able to do that, we've got bigger problems. So the key is, no pun intended, there is no distribution of keys. They are created at the endpoint and only known between the two endpoints. I hope that explained it to you.
Hey, Tracy, if we can move from technology question to a financial question.
Sure.
I know you said that you're at the end zone for a number of contracts here, hope to have a lot more visibility. If I look at the financials today, it's a little bit difficult to forecast out what you're gonna do, and even more difficult for us to value it. When do you think you'll be in a position to start giving guidance or at least more information to investors to help them figure out what you're gonna do going forward and how to value the stock?
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. It's something we debate all the time, right? We're still at that stage of development where one thing sliding a little bit can screw everything up. What I'm hopeful to do, I'm hopeful that early in the fiscal year, October, I'm hopeful that we will put out guidance. You know, it won't be. It's not as though we're a $5 billion company with a deep, long track record where we can forecast highly accurately within a few hundred thousand dollars of what we're gonna do for the quarter or for the year. But my goal is to try and have us put out a number that gives people some reference as to what we'll do for the year. So that's what I'm trying to move toward.
It's something that the market would like to see, but I think the most important thing is getting this seven-figure contract done and dusted so that there's a proof point. And then, you know, that gives us, as I said, a little bit of backlog going into next year, a little more confidence that the go-get doesn't seem so bad.
That's October next month, not next year?
That's October next month. But it's ongoing discussion.
Thank you, everybody. We're out of time. Please see Tracy after if you have any questions. He's very handsome, very young, very knowledgeable. All right, we can get started on the next one. We have Arqit next. Arqit trades on the NASDAQ under ticker ARQQ. Arqit supplies a unique encryption software service, which makes the communications links of any networked device, cloud machine, or data at rest secure against both current and future forms of attack on encryption, even from a quantum computer. As Tracy will cover momentarily, Arqit sells software, cybersecurity applications based on its own novel symmetric key agreement protocol. So it's a very high-level overview of what this company does. And now, I have Tracy Mayer, the company's Chief Financial Strategy Officer, here with us today. So, Tracy, thank you. Welcome to the conference.
Thank you.
All right, man.
By the way, I love Gateway. Thanks, guys, for joining. Very simply, and, you know, I can run through the deck, but I think the key thing to take away from today is, today's encryption, upon which we all rely for communication and commerce, has fundamental weaknesses, and those weaknesses result from the fact that the architecture is thirty years old, number one, and number two, quantum computers are coming, and what quantum computers are very good at is math, and as I'll talk about, today's encryption is predicated on math, and so that is one of the fundamental weaknesses. Safe harbor statement, you all know those. Big picture, what our mission is, is to keep safe the data of citizens, enterprises, and governments around the world, but we do it through our novel symmetric key encryption, okay?
And that's a very important phrase, symmetric key encryption, because today's encryption standard is called asymmetric encryption, and we'll spend a little bit of time on that. So really, the problem today, today's encryption is called PKI, public key infrastructure. And when I talk to people one-on-one, what I say is, when you go to, you know, Amazon, when you go shopping online, you look in the browser, you see that little padlock, and that's telling you that the link is encrypted, is secure. But that link is predicated on two things. One is trust. When you go out to Amazon.
Okay. Yep. So all right, he wanted to go there. So let's go there. Okay. So there's even though there's three, there's three corners to this triangle, it's really four. So two data centers, two endpoints. We distribute to each of those data centers big buckets of long, random numbers. Then each endpoint downloads our light software agent, okay? So it's really like a four corners offense. Anyone play basketball? Right. Four corners offense. Each of those light software agents has a bootstrap key, okay? So Alex and I, our endpoints, want to create a secure channel. Alex is in London, I'm in New York. Alex's device goes out to the London data center and presents himself to the data center.
I go out to the New York data center, and I present myself, and I say, "I want to create a link with Alex." Two data centers talk to each other, and they say, "Let's pick number 62 2 from our list of a thousand numbers. We'll take number 622 " They never tell each other what the number is. They just say, "This is the number in the stack we're choosing." That number then is used to transform the bootstrap key that each of us presented, and then that transformation is sent back to the endpoint, okay? Alex's device then reaches out to me and says, "Hey, was the twelfth digit of your bootstrap changed?" And I say, "Yes." I ask him back, "Was the 221 digit of yours changed?
He says, "No," and we keep doing this back and forth. We're never exchanging numbers until we've done enough authentication to know that we either each have the same number now, or we don't. If we don't, no secure communication channel is created. If we, through the authentication process, now understand through this exchange of clues that we have the same number, a communication channel can be created. But in that process, note I said, at no point is any number actually exchanged.