Overview
- Project Eleven, which on Friday awarded its 1 bitcoin Q-Day Prize to Giancarlo Lelli, confirmed he recovered a 15-bit private key on publicly accessible quantum hardware.
- Lelli used a variant of Shor’s algorithm to search 32,767 possibilities in a test that expands the September 2025 public record by 512 times.
- Bitcoin relies on 256-bit elliptic-curve security, yet recent studies cut estimated needs for a full break to under 500,000 physical qubits in Google’s model and to 10,000–20,000 using a neutral-atom design from Caltech and Oratomic.
- About 6.9 million bitcoin sit in addresses with public keys visible on-chain, leaving those funds exposed once sufficiently powerful quantum machines exist.
- Project Eleven said its next challenge will examine how frontier AI could speed quantum cryptanalysis.