On April 24, Project Eleven, which specializes in post-quantum security of digital assets, presented the Q-Day Prize (1 Bitcoin prize) to Giancarlo Relli, an independent researcher who successfully cracked a 15-bit Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) key from publicly accessible quantum hardware in the cloud.
Organizations measure their results by Largest public demonstration of the type of attack that threatens Bitcoin to dateEthereum and over $2.5 trillion in digital assets backed by the ECC.
According to the company, Lelli used a variant of Scholl’s algorithm to derive private keys from public keys in a search space of 32,767 ways. This algorithm refers to the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). The mathematical basis of the digital signature scheme that secures Bitcoin, Ethereum And most blockchain networks. The company notes that this achievement is not the result of “national labs or commercial chips,” but rather researchers working with available commercial resources.
It must be emphasized that quantum computing is still in the experimental stage. Domestic applications are still insufficient commercial. Despite the company’s statements, progress may rely on proprietary technology with limited access, given that current systems are limited to laboratories and specialized centers.
Quantum attacks on ECC have moved from theory to practice over the past seven months. 6-bit demo created by Steve Tippeconnic in September 2025 This was the first public announcement about quantum hardware; Lelli’s 15-bit result outperforms it by a factor of 512. Project 11 notes that the pace of progress is outpacing previous industry forecasts.
The gap that separates Bitcoin labs
The theoretical resource estimate for a full 256-bit attack (Bitcoin’s operational scale) has declined sharply over the same period. Google’s April 2026 whitepaper put the requirement at less than 500,000 physical qubits, but subsequent papers from Caltech and Oratomic reduced that number to 10,000 qubits for a neutral atom architecture. The organization says there is still a significant distance between the proven 15 bits and the 256 bits used in Bitcoin. Although he argues that this gap is being reframed as an engineering problem, It’s not basic physics.
Project 11 is a company focused on the digital asset ecosystem and developing post-quantum era infrastructure and security tools. CEO Alex Pruden argued that quantum breakthroughs could change the very foundations of cryptocurrencies and could “destroy the entire philosophical model of crypto ownership,” referring to the potential for any actor with sufficient quantum capacity to own cryptoassets. The private key can be derived from the public key published on the chain.. The company has a direct commercial interest in implementing post-quantum solutions.
According to Project Eleven data, approximately 6.9 million Bitcoins are stored in wallets whose public keys are visible on-chain and will eventually be exposed to quantum attacks. Analysis firm Chainalysis previously warned that if a quantum computer were able to derive a private key from a public key, the security model underpinning cryptocurrency systems would be fundamentally compromised. All blockchains that use ECC share similar risks.
The CEO of Project Eleven claims that the Q-Day award results confirm that the transition to post-quantum cryptography cannot be postponed. Google has pledged to be quantum secure by 2029, and the organization warns that the window to predict that transition is closing.