Italian researcher Giancarlo Lelli won Project Eleven's Q-Day Prize by breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on publicly accessible quantum hardware, a 512x jump from the previous record set in September 2025. Not an immediate threat to Bitcoin's 256-bit security, but estimates for the qubits needed to crack it have dropped to under 500,000. Around 6.9M BTC sits in wallets with exposed public keys.
EXPLANATION:
Bitcoin uses 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography to secure wallets. A quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could theoretically derive a private key from a public key, stealing funds. Until now, quantum attacks on ECC were purely theoretical or limited to trivial 6-bit demos. Lelli's 15-bit result, done on cloud quantum hardware with no private chips or national lab, proves the attack class works in practice. The gap from 15-bit to 256-bit is still enormous, but the required resources keep shrinking fast.
Is Bitcoin moving fast enough on post-quantum upgrades? 👇
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