The Project Eleven research team has announced a reward of 1 BTC for successfully hacking the private key of a bitcoin address using a quantum computer. The competition, called the Q-Day Prize, will run until April 5, 2026.
Project Eleven is an independent quantum research initiative founded by Alex Pruden, co—founder and CEO of the Aleo blockchain, who raised $298 million from a16z, SoftBank, Samsung Next, as well as the venture capital division of the Coinbase exchange and other major investors.
Project Eleven is presented as open-source and "made on the Internet". The team positions itself as continuing the traditions of cryptographic challenges of the 1990s (for example, the RSA Challenge and Hal Finney's SSL Cipher Challenge).
Crypto wallets have two keys: an open or public one (this is the address that is displayed in transactions) and a private or private key that opens access to the wallet. Knowing both keys, you can dispose of the cryptocurrency stored on the wallet.
To crack a private key, contestants must use Shor's algorithm, a method that helps decompose numbers into prime factors. In theory, this allows you to bypass the cryptographic protection of the bitcoin network, since the calculation underlying the cryptocurrency involves finding numbers whose product is given in the conditions of the problem.
Project Eleven wants to assess how real the threat of quantum hacking of cryptocurrencies is and how close the emergence of the necessary technologies is.
"We don't have a clear idea of how close we are to a quantum doomsday scenario for existing cryptography. The Q-Day award is designed to turn the theoretical threat posed by a quantum computer into a concrete model," Pruden told Bitcoin Magazine.
According to Project Eleven estimates, more than 6.2 million BTC worth almost $500 billion are currently stored in public key wallets and may be at risk if quantum technologies develop further.
The cryptocurrency development community already offers protective measures against quantum hacking, but their implementation requires a hard fork of the network (changes at the protocol level).
Conversations about the threat from quantum computers for cryptocurrencies have been going on for years. Concerns intensified after Google's 105-qubit Willow Quantum AI chip was released in December 2024. The number of qubits determines the amount of information that can be stored and processed on a quantum device.
Kevin Rose, a former product manager at Google, said at the time that the Willow chip's capabilities were still very far from a real threat to cryptocurrencies. According to him, hacking bitcoin will require a quantum computer with about 13 million qubits.
The main advantage of quantum computing is the ability to solve certain classes of problems much faster. If the classical bit is in the 0 or 1 state, then the quantum bit (qubit) is It is capable of accepting both states at once: both 0 and 1. This property, along with quantum entanglement, allows quantum computing devices to increase their power exponentially as the number of qubits increases.
At the same time, Adam Back, one of the most famous cryptographers in the industry, as well as a candidate for the role of the anonymous creator of bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, believes that research in the field of quantum computing will lead to the creation of more reliable algorithms that can be added to bitcoin in the future.
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