BroadChain News, April 27, 2026 - According to Protos, quantum cybersecurity startup Project Eleven, backed by Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, and others, awarded a researcher a 1 BTC bounty last week, claiming to have cracked a 15-bit elliptic curve key on IBM Quantum hardware. The company's press release stated this was the largest public quantum attack targeting "Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over $2.5 trillion in elliptic curve-encrypted digital assets."
However, multiple independent reviewers replicated the results using non-quantum classical computing strategies, such as random number generation. Bitcoin developer Jonas Schnelli reproduced the entire process with about 20 lines of Python code without a quantum computer, noting that "the quantum computer contributed zero (noise)! The answer was recovered by a classical checker filtering random noise." Coldcard founder NVK called it "classical computing in quantum clothing." The winner Lelli's README also acknowledged: "When shots >> n, random noise itself can recover d with high probability."
Project Eleven's X announcement now includes a community note, pointing out that the method remains effective when quantum output is replaced with random data, showing no quantum advantage. Ark Labs engineer Alex Bergeron stated bluntly: "Zero accountability. We sold a gimmick to the media because the goal isn't to help Bitcoin, but to raise the next funding round." The company, founded by Stanford graduate Alex Pruden, completed a $20 million Series A funding round in January at a $120 million valuation, selling post-quantum migration tools. Pruden later admitted this was "incremental progress in a noisy early field," but its press release had described it as an attack threatening trillions of dollars in assets. Protos previously reported that post-quantum deadlines accelerated by Cloudflare, Google, IBM, and others are concentrated around 2029 to the early 2030s, while Project Eleven's bounty was more about publicity than security progress.