TechFlow News: On April 25, according to CryptoSlate, Project Eleven awarded the Q-Day Prize on April 24 to researcher Giancarlo Lelli, who successfully derived a 15-bit elliptic curve private key from its public key using publicly accessible quantum hardware—the largest-scale public demonstration of its kind to date, representing a 512-fold improvement over the prior 6-bit demonstration in September 2025. Lelli employed a variant of Shor’s algorithm tailored to the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), the mathematical foundation of Bitcoin’s digital signature scheme; the award-winning hardware comprised approximately 70 qubits.
Currently, no known quantum computer can break real-world Bitcoin wallets; Bitcoin’s 256-bit elliptic curve security remains far beyond the capabilities of today’s quantum hardware. Notably, Google revised downward its resource estimates for solving ECDLP-256 on March 31 and set a post-2029 target for migrating to quantum-resistant cryptography; Cloudflare followed suit shortly thereafter, and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) established migration milestones between 2028 and 2035. On-chain data indicates that approximately 6.93 million BTC are potentially vulnerable to quantum attacks due to exposed public keys. The Bitcoin community has proposed BIP 360 and BIP 361 to facilitate migration toward quantum-resistant output types, though coordination across a decentralized network remains the greatest challenge.
