Project Eleven Offers 1 BTC for Successful Quantum Hack of Bitcoin Security
Date: 2025-04-18 Author: Gabriel Deangelo Categories: BUSINESS
Project Eleven has announced a 1 BTC reward for anyone who can crack Bitcoin’s cryptographic security using a quantum computer. The challenge is aimed at drawing attention to the potential threat that quantum computing poses to current cryptocurrency security systems.
Currently, Bitcoin is secured by elliptic curve (ECC) algorithms such as ECDSA and ECDLP. They protect users’ private keys and transaction signatures. However, with the advent of quantum computing, especially Shor’s algorithm, it is theoretically possible to calculate a private key knowing only the public key.
Project Eleven estimates that successfully cracking a 256-bit ECC key would require a quantum computer with approximately 2,330 qubits and the ability to perform 126 billion logical operations using Toffoli gates. If such a hack were to occur, millions of addresses on the Bitcoin network would be at risk, especially those whose public keys had already been exposed during transactions.
Currently, existing quantum devices such as IBM Heron (156 qubits) and Google Willow (105 qubits) are not powerful enough to carry out such an attack. However, the Project Eleven team warns that given the rapid advances in technology and the increasing availability of quantum computing through cloud services from IBM, AWS, and Google, such a hack could become possible much sooner than expected.
Meanwhile, initiatives to protect against future quantum threats are already emerging in the cryptocurrency community. For example, a team of Solana developers recently presented Winternitz Vault, a special digital asset storage that is resistant to hacks using quantum algorithms. The authors believe that their solution will be able to secure users' funds even in the face of the emergence of more powerful quantum machines.
Project Eleven emphasizes that their competition is not only a challenge, but also a warning: the blockchain industry needs to prepare for a new era of computing in order to maintain security and user trust.
