A multi-institutional research team has demonstrated the first universal topological gate set on real quantum hardware, clearing a theoretical barrier that has blocked a key route to fault-tolerant quantum computing for decades. The broader significance is that topological quantum computing aims to store information in global properties of a system, making it less vulnerable to local noise than conventional qubit approaches. However, there had been a longstanding gap: for the simplest non-Abelian topological orders, braiding alone was not enough to reach universality. But these error-correcting codes typically do not, on their own, provide all the operations needed for universal quantum computing on the protected data. The current publication in Nature subjects the results to peer review, lending weight to claims that have sometimes proven premature in the topological computing space.