Overview
- Project Eleven, which on Friday awarded its Q-Day Prize to independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli, confirmed he cracked a simplified 15-bit elliptic-curve key using a publicly accessible quantum computer.
- Lelli derived a private key from a public key by running a variant of Shor’s algorithm across a 32,767-value search space on cloud hardware.
- The feat is the largest public quantum attack on elliptic-curve cryptography to date, expanding a September 2025 six-bit demo by 512 times.
- Production wallets that use 256-bit keys are not breakable today, yet recent papers cut estimated resources for a full attack to under 500,000 physical qubits at Google and to roughly 10,000 qubits in a neutral-atom design from Caltech and Oratomic.
- About 6.9 million bitcoin have public keys already exposed on-chain, which heightens pressure for post-quantum migration plans as Ethereum advances a formal roadmap and Bitcoin debates proposals such as BIP-360.