Overview
- Project Eleven awarded its Q-Day Prize of 1 Bitcoin to Giancarlo Lelli for deriving a private key from a public key on a 15-bit elliptic curve using a public quantum computer.
- The attack used a variant of Shor’s algorithm on a device with about 70 qubits and, once built, finished in minutes, according to the organizers.
- It is the largest public quantum crack of elliptic-curve cryptography to date, expanding from a 6-bit demo in 2025 to 15 bits in a 512-fold jump.
- Recent papers lowered estimates for breaking 256-bit keys to under 500,000 physical qubits in general designs and to roughly 10,000 to 20,000 in neutral-atom systems.
- About 6.9 million Bitcoin sit in addresses that already reveal public keys, and developers are drafting post-quantum upgrades while Project Eleven prepares a follow-on challenge that tests how AI could speed quantum error correction and target selection.