Project Eleven, a quantum cybersecurity startup backed by major crypto investors, awarded one Bitcoin last week to researcher Giancarlo Lelli for supposedly breaking a cryptographic key using IBM Quantum hardware. The firm framed this as the largest public quantum attack on the cryptography securing assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
However, independent reviewers swiftly replicated the feat using non-quantum, classical computing tactics. Within hours, Bitcoin developers reproduced the breakthrough on regular home computers, showing the quantum computer “contributed nothing (noise)!”, according to former Bitcoin Core maintainer Jonas Schnelli.
Researcher Yuval Adam conducted a replication by swapping the IBM Quantum backend for Linux kernel’s /dev/urandom random number source, documenting the outcome in a pull request. He asserted that random data from a non-quantum laptop provided comparable brute force energy for recovering the private key, posting a summary on X.
Consequently, critics called the demonstration “classical computations wearing quantum costumes,” a point even conceded in the prize winner’s own README file. A fact-checking Community Note was added to Project Eleven’s announcement on X, arguing the method provided no quantum advantage.
Meanwhile, the potential conflict of interest is notable, as the company sells post-quantum migration tooling and recently closed a $20 million Series A. Company founder Alex Pruden later conceded the demo was merely “incremental progress,” despite his press release’s dramatic claims.
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